GStreamer was designed to provide a solution to the current Linux media problems. We descibe what we try to achieve with GStreamer. GStreamer wants to provide a clean interface to: The application programmer who wants to build a media pipeline. The programmer can use an extensive set of powerfull tools to create media pipelines without writing a single line of code. Performing complex media manipulations becomes very easy. The plugin programmer. Plugin programmers are provided a clean and simple API to create self contained plugins. An extensive debugging and tracing mechanism has been integrated. GStreamer also comes with an extensive set of real-life plugins that serve as an example too. Adhere as much as possible to the GTK+ object model. A programmer familiar with GTK+ will be confortable with GStreamer. GStreamer uses the mechanism of signals and object arguments. All objects can be queried at runtime for their various properties and capabilities. All GStreamer Objects can be extended using the GTK+ inheritance methods. All plugins are loaded dynamically and can be extended and upgraded independently. plugins are shared libraries that are loaded at runtime. since all the properties of the plugin can be set using the GtkObject arguments, there is no need to have any header files installed for the plugins. Special care has been taking into making the plugin completely self contained. This is in the operations, specification of the capabilities of the plugin and properties. High performance is obtained by: Using glib g_mem_chunk where possible to minimize dynamic memory allocation. Connections between plugins are extremely light-weight. Data can travel the pipeline with minimal overhead. Provide a mechanism to directly work on the target memory. A plugin can for example directly write to the X servers shared mem. Buffers can also point to arbitrary memory like kernel memory. Refcounting and copy on write to minimize the amount of memcpy. Subbufers to efficiently split the data in a buffer. Pipelines can be constructed using cothreads to minimize the threading overhead. Cothreads are a simple user-space method for switching between subtasks. HW acceleration is possible by writing a specialized plugin. Uses a plugin registry with the specifications of the plugins so that the plugin loading can be delayed until the plugin is actually used.