This chapter contains a fairly random selection of things to take care of when writing an element. It's up to you how far you're going to stick to those guidelines. However, keep in mind that when you're writing an element and hope for it to be included in the mainstream &GStreamer; distribution, it has to meet those requirements. As far as possible, we will try to explain why those requirements are set. Make sure the state of an element gets reset when going to NULL. Ideally, this should set all object properties to their original state. This function should also be called from _init. Make sure an element forgets everything about its contained stream when going from PAUSED to READY. In READY, all stream states are reset. An element that goes from PAUSED to READY and back to PAUSED should start reading the stream from he start again. People that use gst-launch for testing have the tendency to not care about cleaning up. This is wrong. An element should be tested using various applications, where testing not only means to make sure it doesn't crash, but also to test for memory leaks using tools such as valgrind. Elements have to be reusable in a pipeline after having been reset. Elements should never use their standard output for debugging (using functions such as printf () or g_print ()). Instead, elements should use the logging functions provided by &GStreamer;, named GST_DEBUG (), GST_INFO (), GST_INFO (), GST_WARNING () and GST_ERROR (). The various logging levels can be turned on and off at runtime and can thus be used for solving issues as they turn up. Ideally, elements should use their own debugging category. Most elements use the following code to do that: GST_DEBUG_CATEGORY_STATIC (myelement_debug); #define GST_CAT_DEFAULT myelement_debug [..] static void gst_myelement_class_init (GstMyelementClass *klass) { [..] GST_DEBUG_CATEGORY_INIT (myelement_debug, "myelement", 0, "My own element"); } At runtime, you can turn on debugging using the commandline --gst-debug=myelement:5. All elements to which it applies (sources, sinks, demuxers) should implement query functions on their pads, so that applications and neighbour elements can request the current position, the stream length (if known) and so on. All elements that are event-aware (their GST_ELEMENT_EVENT_AWARE flag is set) should implement event handling for all events, either specifically or using gst_pad_event_default (). Elements that you should handle specifically are the interrupt event, in order to properly bail out as soon as possible if state is changed. Events may never be dropped unless specifically intended. Loop-based elements should always implement event handling, in order to prevent hangs (infinite loop) on state changes. gst-launch is not a good tool to show that your element is finished. Applications such as Rhythmbox and Totem (for GNOME) or AmaroK (for KDE) are. gst-launch will not test various things such as proper clean-up on reset, interrupt event handling, querying and so on. Parsers and demuxers should make sure to check their input. Input cannot be trusted. Prevent possible buffer overflows and the like. Feel free to error out on unrecoverable stream errors. Test your demuxer using stream corruption elements such as breakmydata (included in gst-plugins). It will randomly insert, delete and modify bytes in a stream, and is therefore a good test for robustness. If your element crashes when adding this element, your element needs fixing. If it errors out properly, it's good enough. Ideally, it'd just continue to work and forward data as much as possible. Demuxers should not assume that seeking works. Be prepared to work with unseekable input streams (e.g. network sources) as well. Sources and sinks should be prepared to be assigned another clock then the one they expose themselves. Always use the provided clock for synchronization, else you'll get A/V sync issues.