[gst-devel] help wrt loading the gstreamer plugins

[Pavan Krishnamurthy]

Hi,



This is my first mail to this group. I have been working on gstreamer since
a few days. Read most of the docs and experimented few things like writing
new audio sink plugin.



But I am not very much clear about some of the concepts. Can anybody explain
me on the following?



   1. Typefind and autoplugging :

 I wanted to know how a media player application builds a pipeline by
itself, just by the media filename. Does the gstreamer loads all the plugins
in the GST_PLUGIN_PATH whenever gstreamer is initialized? If not when will
it load the exact plugin required to handle a particular media type.

In the docs, it is written that, gstreamer uses a typefind element which
iterates through all the plugins which implement typefind functionality. And
when a plugin which can handle that media is found, it emits a signal. So
does it mean that to load a plugin to handle a particular format, all the
plugins in the system needs to be loaded? If not how can the typefind
function of a plugin be called without loading it?



Also I read about the elements "playbin" and "decodebin". Do these elements
help the application to build the pipeline dynamically? If so what mechanism
do they use to build the pipeline?



   1. XML and Registry in gstreamer:

In the docs it is written that XML is used internally to manage the plugin
registry. The plugin registry is a file that contains the definition of all
the plugins GStreamer knows about to have quick access to the specifics of
the plugins.



When is this registry.xml file generated first time? And how is it
generated? How is this file used in gstreamer? Is it used for loading
plugins dynamically?



Thanks in advance for any sort of help.

Regards,

Pavan
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