Current status of GStreamer on Raspberry Pi

[4ernov]

Hello,

I've been experimenting with GStreamer and Raspberry Pi for some time
and found quite strange situation. GStreamer itself seems to work
perfectly on the device and also hardware decoding is available using
gst-omx module. But here come the problems.

1. The most important issue is that there seems to be no way to output
video in proper rate. That is, although you can decode video fast, you
can't show it. AFAIK, XVideo extension is unavailable on Xorg server
on RPi, as well as GLX extensions to use OpenGL ES. ximagesink is
badly slow. Maybe I missed some variant and someone could suggest a
solution? eglessink was mentioned here some time before, but I think
it's still very initial version for now. Would be glad to be mistaken.

2. gst-omx module looks quite matured but for unknown reason it isn't
included in any of native GStreamer packages, even -bad and -ugly
ones. This leads to strange installation procedures (which are quite
straightforward, however) and incompartibilities (h264 decoder seems
to conflict with h264parse). Is there any block list of issues which
stop the module to be included in official packages?

3. Some kind of (1) and (2) together: OpenMAX tunneling support is
somehow absent in gst-omx while it could fix problem (1). I don't
think there're major problems in implementing the feature, I tried to
do something but not still so comfortable with OpenMAX code and have
difficulties with that.

4. Another approach, QtGStreamer could also save the day, but as it
uses OpenGL in sinks, it requires Qt5 (again, no GLX support and no
QtOpenGL support with Qt4 without dirty hacks), but it's unknown if
QtGStreamer compiles against the Qt5. Out of the box it doesn't.

I decided to write here to try to collect any available information on
current state and plans concerning GStreamer on Raspberry Pi and
possibly other OpenMAX devices. I hope it would help to make clear the
situation in this field.

Best regards,
Alexey Chernov