gstreamer-rs

GStreamer bindings for Rust. Documentation can be found here.

These bindings are providing a safe API that can be used to interface with GStreamer, e.g. for writing GStreamer-based applications and GStreamer plugins.

The bindings are mostly autogenerated with gir based on the GObject-Introspection API metadata provided by the GStreamer project.

Why is this separate from the GStreamer monorepo with an independent release schedule?

The GStreamer Rust bindings (gstreamer-rs) and the GStreamer plugins written in Rust (gst-plugins-rs) use separate git repositories and an independent release schedule, unlike for example the Python bindings which are part of the main GStreamer repository. This will not change in the foreseeable future.

This separation does not mean that gstreamer-rs and gst-plugins-rs are not part of the GStreamer project or second-class citizens in GStreamer. The separation is due to technical reasons.

• Release cycle alignment: Both repositories depend on gtk-rs for GLib and GObject bindings. Since gtk-rs follows GNOME's six-monthly release cycle, gstreamer-rs and gst-plugins-rs are aligned to this release cycle as well. This ensures that the APIs stay synchronized as breaking API changes happen every 6, 12 or 18 months. The crates follow cargo's semantic versioning rules to make these breaking API changes easier to handle for users.

• cargo ecosystem integration: Cargo-based Rust projects expect to be able to pull in functionality via crates, and to facilitate that, each plugin in gst-plugins-rs is published as a crate. When a project wants to use the git version of a plugin, or the bindings, forcing them to pull in the entire GStreamer mono repository is excessive. Doing so would introduce unnecessary overhead in network bandwidth, disk usage and build times.

Note that depending on plugins as cargo dependency is explicitly supported and widely used for Rust projects to statically link plugins into applications. For this purpose all plugins are also published to crates.io but depending on git versions is supported as well.

Table of Contents

1. Installation
   1. Linux/BSDs
   2. macOS
   3. Windows
2. Getting Started
3. License
4. Contribution

Installation

To build the GStreamer bindings or anything depending on them, you need to have at least GStreamer 1.14 and gst-plugins-base 1.14 installed. In addition, some of the examples/tutorials require various GStreamer plugins to be available, which can be found in gst-plugins-base, gst-plugins-good, gst-plugins-bad, gst-plugins-ugly and/or gst-libav.

Linux/BSDs

You need to install the above mentioned packages with your distributions package manager, or build them from source.

On Debian/Ubuntu they can be installed with

$ apt-get install libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev \
      gstreamer1.0-plugins-base gstreamer1.0-plugins-good \
      gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly \
      gstreamer1.0-libav libgstrtspserver-1.0-dev libges-1.0-dev

On Fedora:

dnf install gstreamer1-devel gstreamer1-plugins-base-devel \
      gstreamer1-plugins-good gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free \
      gstreamer1-plugin-libav gstreamer1-rtsp-server-devel \
      gst-editing-services-devel

More Fedora packages are available in RPMFusion:

dnf install gstreamer1-plugins-bad-freeworld gstreamer1-plugins-ugly

The minimum required version of the above libraries is >= 1.14. If you build the gstreamer-player sub-crate, or any of the examples that depend on gstreamer-player, you must ensure that in addition to the above packages, libgstreamer-plugins-bad1.0-dev is installed. See the Cargo.toml files for the full details,

$ apt-get install libgstreamer-plugins-bad1.0-dev

On Fedora:

dnf install gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free-devel

Package names on other distributions should be similar. Please submit a pull request with instructions for yours.

macOS

You can install GStreamer and the plugins via Homebrew or by installing the binaries provided by the GStreamer project.

We recommend using the official GStreamer binaries over Homebrew, especially as GStreamer in Homebrew is currently broken.

GStreamer Binaries

You need to download the two .pkg files from the GStreamer website and install them, e.g. gstreamer-1.0-1.20.4-universal.pkg and gstreamer-1.0-devel-1.20.4-universal.pkg.

After installation, you also need to set the PATH environment variable as follows

$ export PATH="/Library/Frameworks/GStreamer.framework/Versions/1.0/bin${PATH:+:$PATH}"

Also note that the pkg-config from GStreamer should be the first one in the PATH as other versions have all kinds of quirks that will cause problems.

Homebrew

The Homebrew gstreamer formula bundles all gst-* GStreamer plugin modules

$ brew install gstreamer

Make sure the version is >= 1.14.

Windows

You can install GStreamer and the plugins via MSYS2 with pacman or by installing the binaries provided by the GStreamer project.

We recommend using the official GStreamer binaries over MSYS2.

GStreamer Binaries

You need to download the two .msi files for your platform from the GStreamer website and install them, e.g. gstreamer-1.0-x86_64-1.20.4.msi and gstreamer-1.0-devel-x86_64-1.20.4.msi. Make sure to select the version that matches your Rust toolchain, i.e. MinGW or MSVC.

After installation set the ``PATH` environment variable as follows:

# For a UNIX-style shell:
$ export PATH="c:/gstreamer/1.0/msvc_x86_64/bin${PATH:+:$PATH}"

# For cmd.exe:
$ set PATH=C:\gstreamer\1.0\msvc_x86_64\bin;%PATH%

Make sure to update the path to where you have actually installed GStreamer and for the corresponding toolchain.

Also note that the pkg-config.exe from GStreamer should be the first one in the PATH as other versions have all kinds of quirks that will cause problems.

MSYS2 / pacman

$ pacman -S glib2-devel pkg-config \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-gstreamer mingw-w64-x86_64-gst-plugins-base \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-gst-plugins-good mingw-w64-x86_64-gst-plugins-bad \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-gst-plugins-ugly mingw-w64-x86_64-gst-libav \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-gst-rtsp-server

Make sure the version of these libraries is >= 1.14.

Note that the version of pkg-config included in MSYS2 is known to have problems compiling GStreamer, so you may need to install another version. One option would be pkg-config-lite.

Getting Started

The API reference can be found here, however it is only the Rust API reference and does not explain any of the concepts.

For getting started with GStreamer development, the best would be to follow the documentation on the GStreamer website, especially the Application Development Manual. While being C-centric, it explains all the fundamental concepts of GStreamer and the code examples should be relatively easily translatable to Rust. The API is basically the same, function/struct names are the same and everything is only more convenient (hopefully) and safer. The Rust APIs are annotated with #[doc(alias = "c_function_name")], so you can search for a C function name in this documentation and find the corresponding Rust binding.

In addition there are tutorials on the GStreamer website. Many of them were ported to Rust already and the code can be found in the tutorials directory.

Some further examples for various aspects of GStreamer and how to use it from Rust can be found in the examples directory.

Various GStreamer plugins written in Rust can be found in the gst-plugins-rs repository.

LICENSE

gstreamer-rs and all crates contained in here are licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

GStreamer itself is licensed under the Lesser General Public License version 2.1 or (at your option) any later version: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.html

Contribution

Any kinds of contributions are welcome as a pull request.

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in gstreamer-rs by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.