- GStreamer is open source, cross platform, pipeline based framework for multimedia. Gstreamer is used in Media players, Video/Audio editors, Web browsers, Streaming servers, etc. They rely heavily on threads to process the data.
- GStreamer helps build pipeline workflows in which it reads a file in one format, process them (resize, rescale, add filters) and then export it into another format.
Follow this blog to install all the dependencies (such as codec files and other libraries) and build OpenCV with GStreamer.
- GstElement object is the basic building block for media pipeline. All the elements such as decoder, encoder, demux which we see as a black box, have been derived from GstElement.
- Elements (such as sink, source or filter) have properties which are used to modify their behaviour. They also have signals which help them execute a function call on the element.
- Properties of gstreamer elements can be viewed by using gst-inspect-1.0
Source — Source elements are those which can only generate data. Such as video file or an IP camera.
Sink — Sink elements are end points in a pipeline. For example, Output video playback, soundcard playback, screen, disk writing are sink elements.
Filters - They have both input and output. They recieve data as well as send the data after some kind of processing.Examples of such examples are converters, demuxers and decoders.
- In simple terms, we take in several components of GStreamer, such as input video source, video decoder and output source, put them together one after the other.
- Each element is seperated by ‘!’ and has spaces before and after ‘!’.