[gst-devel] gstreamer and HTTP - Progressive download r

[Michael Smith]

On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 9:52 AM, declan harrison
<harrison.declan at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi Guys
> I have just recently downloaded the source code for gstreamer and I am
> planning to build and do some basic testing of the software over the next
> few weeks.
> So there are very basic questions of what gstreamer can provide me.  So I
> will just list the question I have and hope you can help.
> Does gstreamer support on-the-fly encoding of video content over HTTP if
> used in conjunction with ffmpeg or any other 3rd party video software?

Yes, GStreamer is capable of on-the-fly encoding - but GStreamer
doesn't include an HTTP server to actually stream it to a client.
There are some third-party applications that do that, or you could
write your own.

> Do I need to provide a plugin to use ffmpeg with gstreamer or does it have
> support for that out of the box?

There's a gst-ffmpeg plugin. It's not part of gstreamer core - the
core doesn't include most plugins; they're provided in separate
packages.

> The containers formats I am most interested in encoding Flash Video(flv) and
> MP4 formats? Does gstreamer allow for on-the-fly encoding for MP4? Do I need
> to provide any extra plugins to allow me to acheive this?

What does "on-the-fly" encoding mean here? MP4 is a fundamentally
non-streamable format (though you can do playback from a
'progressively downloaded' MP4 file if you want) - this is not a
limitation of GStreamer, but of the file format. GStreamer can encode
and mux MP4 files, though. You'll need the qtmux plugin which is found
in gst-plugins-bad.

Mike