# General

Is GStreamer a media player ?

No, GStreamer is a development framework for creating applications like media players, video editors, streaming media broadcasters and so on. That said, very good media players can easily be built on top of GStreamer and we even include a simple yet functional media player with GStreamer, called gst-player.

Why is GStreamer written in C ? Why not C++/Objective-C/... ?

We like C. Aside from "personal preference", there are a number of technical reasons why C is nice in this project:

- C is extremely portable.

- C is fast.

- It is easy to make language bindings for libraries written in C.

- The GObject object system provided by GLib implements objects in C, in a portable, powerful way. This library provides for introspection and runtime dynamic typing. It is a full OO system, but without the syntactic sugar. If you want sugar, take a look at GOB.

- Use of C integrates nicely with Gtk+ and GNOME. Some people like this a lot, but neither Gtk+ nor GNOME are required by GStreamer.

So, in closing, we like C. If you don't, that's fine; if you still want to help out on GStreamer, we always need more language binding people. And if not, don't bother us; we're working :-)

What applications are available for GStreamer ?

GStreamer is still very early in its development, but already we see some really nice applications being developed in parallel with GStreamer. Both gst-player and gst-editor are very closely linked to GStreamer itself for obvious reasons. For a list of some of the more advanced projects, look at the list in our Status table.

What are the exact licensing terms for GStreamer and its plugins ?

All of GStreamer, including our own plugin code, is licensed under the GNU LGPL license. Some of the libraries we use for some of the plugins are however under the GPL, which means that those plugins can not be used by a non-GPL-compatible application.

As part of the GStreamer source download you find a file called license_README. That file contains information in the exact licensing terms of the libraries we use. As a general rule, GStreamer aims at using only LGPL or BSD licensed libraries if available and only use GPL or proprietary libraries where no good LGPL or BSD alternatives are available.

From GStreamer 0.4.2 on, we implemented a license field for all of the plugins, and in the future we might have the application enforce a stricter policy (much like tainting in the kernel).

Is GStreamer a sound server ?

No, GStreamer is not a soundserver. GStreamer does however have plugins supporting most of the major soundservers available today, including ESD, aRTSd, and to some extent Jack. Support for MAS is also planned.

Will GStreamer be available for platforms other than Unix ?

Depends. Our main target is the Unix platform. That said, interest has been expressed in porting GStreamer to other platforms and the GStreamer core team will gladly accept patches to accomplish this. Please refer to the platform support status table

What is GStreamer's relationship with the GNOME community ?

While GStreamer is operated as an independent project, we do have a close relationship with the GNOME community. Many of our hackers consider themselves also to be members of the GNOME community. There are plans to make (some part of) GStreamer an official part of the development framework of GNOME. This does not exclude use of GStreamer by other communities at all, of course.

What is GStreamer's relationship with the KDE community ?

The GStreamer community wants to have as good a relationship as possible with KDE, and we hope that someday KDE decides to adopt GStreamer as their multimedia API, just like the GNOME community plans on doing. There have been contacts from time to time between the GStreamer community and KDE and we do already have support for the aRTSd sound server used by KDE. Also, some of the KDE hackers have created Qt bindings of GStreamer and made a simple video player.

I'm considering adding GStreamer output to my application...

That doesn't really make sense. GStreamer is not a sound server, so you don't output directly to GStreamer, and it's not an intermediate API between audio data and different kinds of audio sinks. It is a fundamental design decision to use GStreamer in your app; there are no easy ways of somehow 'transfering' data from your app to GStreamer. Instead, your app would have to use or implement a number of GStreamer elements, string them together, and tell them to run. In that manner the data would all be internal to the GStreamer pipeline.

That said, it is possible to write a plugin specific to your app that can get at the audio data.