GStreamer

GStreamer is an extremely powerful and versatile framework designed to create streaming media applications. Many of the virtues of this framework come from its modularity: GStreamer can seamlessly incorporate new plugin modules.

From a technical point of view, the GStreamer framework was designed to make it easy to write applications that handle audio and video, giving the developer the ability of processing any kind of flow. Its main advantages are that the pluggable components can be mixed and matched into arbitrary pipelines so that it’s possible to write a full-fledged video or audio editing application.

From the users’ point of view, this flexibility in the structure gives applications higher capability to playing audio and video files in a much smoother way, saving memory consumption and thus enhancing the user experience. Besides, this plasticity also gives GStreamer the possibility of spanning a very wide variety of formats, including MP3, Ogg/Vorbis, MPEG, AVI, Windows Media, among many others. Basically, a GStreamer application offers the possibility of playing almost any type of multimedia file since it supports all major audio and video formats.

Due to the above mentioned reasons, GStreamer has quickly established itself as the de-facto standard multimedia framework for GNU/Linux and UNIX systems.

If you are interested in building your own application using GStreamer and want to profit from a professional SDK and detailed documentation, visit GStreamer.com .
If you have further questions regarding this topic or would like to have a more technical approach, we suggest you visit the GStreamer website at Freedesktop.org.

FAQ

Q: Is GStreamer a media player?
A: No, GStreamer is a development framework for creating applications like media players, video editors, streaming media broadcasters, etc. as well as other software components like codecs, filters, muxers or demuxers. As a result, high quality media players can easily be built on top of it.

Q: Does Fluendo have any applications available for GStreamer?
A: Since Fluendo develops software built on this framework, all our codecs and players are suitable for GStreamer.

Q: What formats does GStreamer support?
A: GStreamer supports most formats, including all major ones: Flash, MPEG, AVI, Windows Media, etc. With GStreamer, chances are the format that you need to reproduce is supported and you won’t experience any problems playing your music and videos.

Q: Does GStreamer work on platforms other than Linux ?
A: GStreamer works very well on Open Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X.

Q: How can I get GStreamer for my current applications?
A: GStreamer is not something that you can get and incorporate to your applications. If you want to benefit from the virtues offered by GStreamer, you have to make sure that the applications you use to playback your media are built on this framework.

Q: Why must I pay for a patent license?
A: The codecs decode/code formats that are under patents. To be able to use these codecs at a professional level, it is needed to be entitled by the owner of the patent to do so.

Q: Who uses GStreamer?
A: These are some of the most notable applications running on GStreamer:

GStreamer Conference: Fluendo's Records

2010 - GStreamer Conference, Cambridge: Intel SMD Elements for Intel® CE Media Processors:
Elements developed by Fluendo provide video decoders, post-processing and its rendering elements, as well as audio decoders and its correspondent rendering elements, leverageing the hardware capabilities to decode 2 simultaneous full HD video streams while managing digital audio passthrough and transcoding.

2011 - GStreamer Conference, Prague: Time Shifting with GStreamer The Time Shifting Element developed by Fluendo provides home entertainment devices with an improved user experience. This element is intended to give the freedom to seek back in live streams at any time and without the need of previously recording

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