[gst-devel] The best way to control a plugin from application?

[Tim-Philipp Müller]

On Wed, 2009-06-24 at 17:27 -0700, joh wrote:

Hi,

> I am writing a plugin which processes multiple streams upon request of
> application.
> 
> For example, my plugin has a list which contains three video streams.
> Initially, the plugin processes one stream, but not all of them. When
> my application "some how" requests other streams to the plugin, then
> it should start to running the other streams.

It sounds like request pads might be what you're looking for. You should
be able to add/remove request sink pads while the pipeline is running if
implemented properly. tee, adder and videomixer support that, for
example (IIRC).


> Here is the question: how can I let the plugin start to work while
> main pipeline is running?
> I was thinking about the way setting a property, so that it triggers
> the action. However, the property is not supposed to be used for this
> purpose. Right? Are there better ways to do this?

It depends. You could use it for this purpose (it could be an 'active
streams' bitmask, for example, which isn't really much different from
setting the active audio stream in playbin via a property).

An alternative are 'action signals' where the app/caller uses
g_signal_emit_by_name (element, "do-something", arguments) -
appsrc/appsink in -base and camerabin in -bad use these to trigger
certain actions, for example.

If it's a static plugin/element that is part of your application (and
not installed into the system gstreamer plugin directory) then you may
just as well expose API/functions to control it directly though. Nothing
wrong with that IMHO.

 Cheers
  -Tim