Delay loading of GStreamer DLLs on Windows

[Nirbheek Chauhan]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 5:13 PM, Andy Robinson <andy at seventhstring.com> wrote:
> I could, as you say, bundle the DLLs. My app download for Windows is
> currently 2.2 MB so it seems a little strange to increase that to over 100
> MB (the size of gstreamer-1.0-x86-1.6.1-merge-modules.zip), when many of my

You don't need to (and should never) ship the entire contents of that
zip file with your application. Your application only links to a tiny
subset of that, and you can check what it links to with dumpbin.
Usually it's just libgstreamer-1.0-0.dll and its dependencies: orc,
glib (libglib, libgmodule, libgobject), libintl, libffi. All these
when compressed are less than 5MB.

> users wouldn't need the extra capabilities that GStreamer would provide. I
> would also have to think about how to comply with the licenses, as my app is
> closed source so I can't just include everything (GPL license, patents,
> etc).
>

Thanks to the plugin-based architecture of GStreamer, your application
never links to any of these plugins (also these are all in
gst-plugins-ugly), you don't need to ship any of them with your
application, and basically no one does that. Just ship whatever
plugins you use (mostly plugins from -base and -good) as a separate
zip file for users to download if they want to use the extra features
of your application.

Of course, all this is a trade-off. If increasing the download from
2.2MB to 7-10MB is unacceptable to you, the shim is the other option.

-- 
~Nirbheek Chauhan