How to extract tags from a stream without playing it?

[Arun Raghavan]

On Fri, 2011-06-10 at 14:05 -0400, Phong Cao wrote:
> Hello everybody,
> 
> 
> I am trying to write a music manager application and would like to get
> the stream tags (artist, album, etc...) and display it to the users.
> However, I don't know how to do this. I have read the GStreamer Manual
> but the section about tags reading is not presented carefully in
> there. Therefore, I just want to know which GStreamer functions I need
> to use to read the tags from the media files without opening them. 

For exactly what you need, take a look at:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=564749

For something more immediate:
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/doc/gstreamer/head/gst-plugins-base-libs/html/gst-plugins-base-libs-gstdiscoverer.html

Cheers,
Arun