First steps to extracting some video with Gstreamer 1.2.1

[Lasse Laursen]

Hey Guys,

I'm commencing my first steps to try and extract some individual video 
frames from video to use in my application. I hope you won't mind if I 
ask some fairly basic questions here regarding how to proceed and if 
I've understood everything correctly.

To be brief my goal is - at first - to open most any video file  and 
extract a few raw frames which I will manually put on to an OpenGL 
texture for use. The audio that is attached to the video is kind of 
irrelevant for me. At this time I would generally just ignore it. I 
should note that I'm not really set on opening most video types - in 
fact I'll probably settle for a very specific format that suits my 
needs, but at first it'd be nice just to extract some frames from any 
video type I happen to have lying around.

I've read through most of the gstreamer 0.1 tutorials just to get a 
basic idea of how the framework works, but there are a few things I'm 
still a bit hazy about and I thought I'd ask here just to get an 
uptodate reply:

1) Given that - at first - I'm keen to just open any video file and get 
a the frames, it seems like I need to look closer at the uridecodebin 
base plugin. I've also noticed the autovideosrc good plug in, and I'm 
guessing that it's closely related to the first plugin I mentioned?

2) Since I'm keen to - at first - open most any video file, I'm guessing 
I'll often end up with a pipeline that uses a demuxer which will provide 
me with both an audio and video src. I need to pipe the audio output 
into a trash sink as I'm not interested in ever using it. Is that just 
the appsink plugin? It seems to double as both an all purpose sink and a 
sink used for grabbing data for use in an application.

That's it at first :) I hope what I'm saying isn't too silly.

Regards,
Lasse