Building GstElement plugins using CMake

[Kyle Mallory]

Two questions:

1) Has anyone had any success at building GStreamer Element plugins 
using CMake rather than make?

2) How difficult is it to create plugins that are decoupled from the 
Gstreamer templates that create the framework for registering the 
plugins, etc?


Background:

We are interested in using Gstreamer as the video pipeline for our drone 
(www.tealdrones.com), and would like to utilize plugins as an "entry 
point" for our drone-side SDK to access that pipeline.  For example, a 
developer could use Gst plugins to provide augmented reality capability 
by taking the default camera pipeline, receiving telemetry information 
from the Teal SDK, and rendering over the video pipeline, before sending 
the resulting stream of RTP to the ground station.

One of the challenges we are facing is the ease of entry into developing 
plugins. We need to make it as simple as possible for our SDK users to 
create a basic plugin, that provides frames on one end, and accepts 
frames on the downward side.  We're considering providing a wrapper 
layer to encapsulate this basic functionality, but the current tools are 
not very friendly.

Further complicating this, our SDK build system is built around CMake, 
and we promote the use of CLion as our preferred IDE.

Our goal is to provide a 3 or 4 bullet-proof examples of how to create 
new plugins, that just work with Gstreamer.


Thanks in advance, and I'm looking forward to participating regularly 
(and hopefully contributing meaningfully) to future discussions.


--Kyle