Using appsink in an shmsrc pipeline

[Kyle Flores]

Hi gst-devel,

I'm working on an application where a single camera produces a stream that
I'd like multiple clients (such as a display, or network stream) to use.
One such client is an appsink that does some custom work, and then stops
after it has processed a fixed number of buffers. My goal is to capture a
"snapshot" of the camera stream with this, and am trying to have an appsink
pipeline run temporarily and then go back to null, but I'm open to other
ways to accomplish the same thing, as something's incorrect about mine.

Here are pipelines descriptions that simulate my configuration, but in
practice run inside an application rather than by gst-launch-1.0.
- "camera" source: videotestsrc is-live=true pattern=ball !
video/x-raw,format=I420,width=640,height=480,framerate=60/1 ! shmsink
name=source_shmsink socket-path=/tmp/shmdemo sync=false
wait-for-connection=false
- display client: shmsrc name=watch_shmsrc socket-path=/tmp/shmdemo
is-live=true ! video/x-raw,format=I420,width=640,height=480,framerate=60/1
! videoconvert ! autovideosink sync=false
- appsink client: shmsrc name=app_shmsrc socket-path=/tmp/shmdemo
is-live=true ! video/x-raw,format=I420,width=640,height=480,framerate=60/1
! appsink sink=false

All three pipelines are set to playing, I see the display pop up, and then
another thread begins calling pull_sample on the appsink, reporting each
sample that arrives. The thread stops calling pull_sample after handling a
fixed number of samples, then tries to set the state of the appsink client
pipeline to NULL. In the logs I see the appsink go to NULL, but a short
time after this, the display client also appears to stop. Additionally, I
don't see that message from shmsink that a client disconnected that appears
when other shmsrc clients go to NULL. I tried various combinations of
properties on shmsrc/sink and appsink but haven't seen anything change yet.
Ideally, I'd like the camera source and the display client to continue even
after the appsink client stops, and I don't understand how stopping the
appsink client affects the display client.

I'd be curious to know if/how I'm misusing appsink or the shmsrc/sink pair.
Specifically for the shm plugins I haven't found much precise info so my
usage has just been based on observing their behavior.  I've seen my app do
the same thing on different gst versions so I don't think this is a bug
with the plugins themselves.

Thanks for any suggestions or pointers.
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