# Introduction

This chapter gives you an overview of the technologies described in this book.

## What is GStreamer?

GStreamer is a framework for creating streaming media applications. The fundamental design comes from the video pipeline at Oregon Graduate Institute, as well as some ideas from DirectShow.

GStreamer's development framework makes it possible to write any type of streaming multimedia application. The GStreamer framework is designed to make it easy to write applications that handle either audio or video or both. The pipeline design is made to have no extra overhead above what the applied filters induce. This makes GStreamer a good framework for designing even high-end audio applications which puts high demands on latency.

One of the the most obvious uses of GStreamer is using it to build a media player. GStreamer already includes components for building a media player that can support a very wide variety of formats, including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, MPEG1, MPEG2, AVI, Quicktime, mod and so on. GStreamer, however, is much more than just another media player. Its main advantages are that the pluggable components can be mixed and matched into arbitrary pipelines so that it's possible to write a full-fledged video or audio editing application.

The framework is based on plugins that will provide the various codec and other functionality. The plugins can be linked and arranged in a pipeline. This pipeline defines the flow of the data. Pipelines can also be edited with a GUI editor and saved as XML so that pipeline libraries can be made with a minimum of effort.

The GStreamer core function is to provide a framework for plugins, data flow and media type handling/negotiation. It also provides an API to write applications using the various plugins.

This book is about GStreamer from a developer's point of view; it describes how to write a GStreamer application using the GStreamer libraries and tools. For an explanation about writing plugins, we suggest the Plugin Writers Guide.