GStreamer
GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework written in the C programming language with the type system based on GObject.
GStreamer allows a programmer to create a variety of media-handling components, including simple audio playback, audio and video playback, recording, streaming and editing. The pipeline design serves as a base to create many types of multimedia applications such as video editors, streaming media broadcasters, and media players.
Designed to be cross-platform, it is known to work on Linux (x86, PowerPC and ARM), Solaris (Intel and SPARC), macOS, Microsoft Windows and OS/400. GStreamer has bindings for programming-languages like Python, C++, Perl, GNU Guile (guile), and Ruby. GStreamer is free software, licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.
Contents
Installation
Install a GStreamer version from the official repositories:
- gstreamer - Current version.
- gstreamer0.10 - Legacy version.
To make GStreamer useful, install the plugins packages you require.
Current version plugins
- gst-libav - Libav-based plugin containing many decoders and encoders.
- gst-plugins-bad - Plugins that need more quality, testing or documentation.
- gst-plugins-base - Essential exemplary set of elements.
- gst-plugins-good - Good-quality plugins under LGPL license.
- gst-plugins-ugly - Good-quality plugins that might pose distribution problems.
- gst-plugin-libde265AUR - libde265AUR plugin (an open h.265 video codec implementation) for gstreamer.
Legacy version plugins
- gstreamer0.10-bad-plugins - Plugins that need more quality, testing or documentation.
- gstreamer0.10-base-plugins - Essential exemplary set of elements.
- gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg - Libav-based plugin containing many decoders and encoders.
- gstreamer0.10-good-plugins - Good-quality plugins under LGPL license.
- gstreamer0.10-ugly-plugins - Good-quality plugins that might pose distribution problems.
Integration
PulseAudio
PulseAudio support is provided by good plugins packages.
Lightweight desktops
To configure GStreamer, for example to change the audio output device, use gstreamer-properties from package gstreamer-propertiesAUR. This can be run by each user or as root for all users. Per-user configuration files are under $HOME/.gconf/system/gstreamer
and the global files are in /etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults
.
KDE / Phonon integration
See Phonon.
Hardware acceleration
See Hardware video acceleration.
GStreamer will automatically detect and use the correct API [1]. Depending on your system you can install:
- gstreamer-vaapi for VA-API support.
- gst-plugins-bad for VDPAU support.
Troubleshooting
assertion 'mini_object->refcount > 0' failed
If you get an GStreamer-CRITICAL **: gst_mini_object_unref: assertion 'mini_object->refcount > 0' failed
error (which usually occurs when recording video), you can install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg to fix it.