gstreamer/docs/manual/basics-data.xml

<chapter id="chapter-data">
  <title>Buffers and Events</title>
  <para>
    The data flowing through a pipeline consists of a combination of
    buffers and events. Buffers contain the actual media data. Events
    contain control information, such as seeking information and
    end-of-stream notifiers. All this will flow through the pipeline
    automatically when it's running. This chapter is mostly meant to
    explain the concept to you; you don't need to do anything for this.
  </para>

  <sect1 id="section-buffers">
    <title>Buffers</title>
    <para>
      Buffers contain the data that will flow through the pipeline you have
      created. A source element will typically create a new buffer and pass
      it through a pad to the next element in the chain.  When using the
      GStreamer infrastructure to create a media pipeline you will not have
      to deal with buffers yourself; the elements will do that for you.
    </para>
    <para> 
      A buffer consists, amongst others, of:
    </para>
    <itemizedlist>
      <listitem>
        <para>
          Pointers to memory objects. Memory objects encapsulate a region
          in the memory.
        </para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
        <para>
          A timestamp for the buffer.
        </para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
        <para>
          A refcount that indicates how many elements are using this
          buffer. This refcount will be used to destroy the buffer when no
          element has a reference to it.
        </para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
        <para>
          Buffer flags.
        </para>
      </listitem>
    </itemizedlist>
    <para>
      The simple case is that a buffer is created, memory allocated, data
      put in it, and passed to the next element.  That element reads the
      data, does something (like creating a new buffer and decoding into
      it), and unreferences the buffer.  This causes the data to be free'ed
      and the buffer to be destroyed. A typical video or audio decoder
      works like this.
    </para>
    <para>
      There are more complex scenarios, though. Elements can modify buffers
      in-place, i.e. without allocating a new one. Elements can also write
      to hardware memory (such as from video-capture sources) or memory
      allocated from the X-server (using XShm). Buffers can be read-only,
      and so on.
    </para>
  </sect1>

  <sect1 id="section-events">
    <title>Events</title>
    <para>
      Events are control particles that are sent both up- and downstream in
      a pipeline along with buffers. Downstream events notify fellow elements
      of stream states. Possible events include seeking, flushes,
      end-of-stream notifications and so on. Upstream events are used both
      in application-element interaction as well as element-element interaction
      to request changes in stream state, such as seeks. For applications,
      only upstream events are important. Downstream events are just
      explained to get a more complete picture of the data concept.
    </para>
    <para>
      Since most applications seek in time units, our example below does so
      too:
    </para>
    <programlisting>
static void
seek_to_time (GstElement *element,
	      guint64     time_ns)
{
  GstEvent *event;

  event = gst_event_new_seek (1.0, GST_FORMAT_TIME,
			      GST_SEEK_FLAG_NONE,
			      GST_SEEK_METHOD_SET, time_ns,
			      GST_SEEK_TYPE_NONE, G_GUINT64_CONSTANT (0));
  gst_element_send_event (element, event);
}
    </programlisting>
    <para>
      The function <function>gst_element_seek ()</function> is a shortcut
      for this. This is mostly just to show how it all works.
    </para>
  </sect1>
</chapter>