newbie question about Gstreamer

[David Röthlisberger]

On 16 Nov 2012, at 03:07, little_endian wrote:
> I am new to the Gstreamer world and going through the Gstreamer
> documentation. What I fail to understand so far is what is the advantage
> (value add) of Gstreamer? It is a framework so where does it add value? Put
> another way - from the documentation, how is "Its main advantages are that
> the pluggable components can be mixed and matched into arbitrary pipelines
> so that it's possible to write a full-fledged video or audio editing
> application." made possible?


My project stb-tester[1] uses GStreamer to handle the video stream from
video-capture hardware used to test set-top boxes. Using GStreamer means
that I can use any video-capture hardware supported by GStreamer, but I
could also use other GStreamer sources (for example a network source so
that the video-capture and the video processing don't have to happen on
the same PC, or a file source to play back pre-recorded samples against
stb-tester's unit tests) and any GStreamer sink (to view the video on
screen, or save it to a file for logging purposes, or stream it across
the network...).

The scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave
Observatory use GStreamer to distribute the processing of audio-spectrum
data across large clusters of PCs.[2]

[1] http://stb-tester.com

[2] http://gstconf.ubicast.tv/videos/gstreamer-for-large-scale-scientific-signal-processing/