How does playbin automatically chose video-sink?

[Tim Müller]

On Fri, 2015-05-22 at 09:28 -0600, Gary Thomas wrote:

Hi Gary,

> I have a situation which uses playbin "under the covers", i.e.
> I'm using gst-play-1.0 on a video stream which uses playbin but
> does not [currently] support an option to pass video-sink.

$ gst-play-1.0 --videosink=yoursink or even --videosink="yoursink
someproperty=xyz"

should work. See gst-play-1.0 --help.

> I'd like to understand how playbin is choosing the video sink
> because the automatic selection only works for a complete
> screen overlay (X11) but is failing when the output should
> be a specific window.  I've found that playbin chooses GstOverlaySink
> (that's what the .dot file says).  I believe I could get this
> working better if I could select a more appropriate sink for
> my hardware.
> 
> Questions:
> * How is this selection made?
> * What might be the best way to mange the automatic selection
>    so that my [more appropriate] sink is chosen?
> 
> Thanks for any insight
> 
> n.b. it should be obvious that I'm interested in gstreamer-1.0
> solutions.

Playbin uses the autovideosink by default, which will try sinks
according to their 'rank' as used in gst_element_register().

Cheers
 -Tim

-- 
Tim Müller, Centricular Ltd - http://www.centricular.com