This section talks about the different things you can do when building and shipping your applications and plugins. The Plugin Writer's Guide describes in great detail how to write elements for the &GStreamer; framework. In this section, we will solely discuss how to embed such elements statically in your application. This can be useful for application-specific elements that have no use elsewhere in &GStreamer;. Dynamically loaded plugins contain a structure that's defined using GST_PLUGIN_DEFINE (). This structure is loaded when the plugin is loaded by the &GStreamer; core. The structure contains an initialization function (usually called plugin_init) that will be called right after that. It's purpose is to register the elements provided by the plugin with the &GStreamer; framework. If you want to embed elements directly in your application, the only thing you need to do is to replace GST_PLUGIN_DEFINE () with a call to gst_plugin_register_static (). As soon as you call gst_plugin_register_static (), the elements will from then on be available like any other element, without them having to be dynamically loadable libraries. In the example below, you would be able to call gst_element_factory_make ("my-element-name", "some-name") to create an instance of the element.