Recommendations for how to best use gstreamer in our system

[Ben Rush]

Greetings all.

I've spent a good chunk of the day investigating gstreamer and I'd like to
pose a question about how to best use gstreamer in a particular part of
our application. I'm mostly double-checking my understanding of how
gstreamer is laid out and intended to be used. Let me (very briefly)
describe what we're doing, and then ask my question.

We have a system that resides in hospitals and it uses a host of computer
vision and machine learning to predict the behavior of patients. One of the
key aspects of this technology in the hospital is its ability to stream
video of these events (live) to recipients (typically nurses), which are
either on their phones or a desktop machine (often many clients will view
the same stream at the same time, often over a flakey wireless connection).
One of the single-most attractive features of gstreamer is that we can
standardize on multiple platforms (Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone, etc).
Right now we do not, and it is a pain to maintain.

>From the encoding/decoding/playback side of things, I think gstreamer seems
like a very obvious choice (especially given the platform agnosticism).
However, from the standpoint of streaming the video out, I'm still unsure
of the best tactic. So, here is my question:

I see there is a fully functional RTSP server that comes with gstreamer (
https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/rtp.html). We currently use
Live555 and it has been quite stable (but, again, if we can get away with
using gstreamer here we will to make things standardized). I also see that
there's a RTMP "sink" which is used to transmit a source to an RTMP server
(like Wowza or, most likely in our case if we go this route, NGINX). In
addition, there is a "gstreamer data protocol" which seems to not be
discussed much in the docs, but is mentioned here (
http://www.einarsundgren.se/gstreamer-basic-real-time-streaming-tutorial/).
What other options are people using for streaming content atop the
gstreamer ecosystem? I'm particularly interested in hearing how the RTSP
server has performed in the wild.

A great deal of what I find (and reasonably so) with respect to streaming
and gstreamer is for playback (such as HTTP adaptive streaming), but I'd
like to cover my bases and make sure I've understood what's available from
the perspective of broadcasting (especially since I'll be the one tasked
with writing all of it).

Thanks for staying with me thus far, and I look forward to your response.
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