"Uncrashable" video/audio source and sinks

[superlou]

I apologize if this is a dumb question.  I've thrown around a video toaster
like application for about a year now in my free time, where a requirement
is to be able to add/remove/relocate bins without stopping the pipeline. 
What I've found is that there is a huge world of edge cases to handle to
block the pads, change the pipeline, and remove the blocks without the
pipeline crashing.  Also, there are some elements (v4l2src) that crash
themselves if they lose their source, and I haven't found a way to detect
their loss of signals before the pipeline goes down.

I was wondering if there is a simpler way: is there some sort of generic
video (and audio) sink element that generates black frames (or silent audio)
of a predefined cap when it is not linked properly, and forwards the good
data when it is linked properly?  Then I can create bins where all the
inputs are linked first to this magic sink element so the worst case
scenario is that I get black/silent output when the links are
rearranged/broken.  Is there already some kind of functionality like this,
or would it be possible to implement?  I'm not particularly concerned about
performance since this is an application where I can throw a lot of the
hardware at the problem.  Feel free to tell me off if I'm trying to abstract
something in an inappropriate way.

Open to any suggestions, criticisms, etc.

Thanks,
Louis



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