&GStreamer; makes a clear distinction between two types of metadata, and has support for both types. The first is stream tags, which describe the content of a stream in a non-technical way. Examples include the author of a song, the title of that very same song or the album it is a part of. The other type of metadata is stream-info, which is a somewhat technical description of the properties of a stream. This can include video size, audio samplerate, codecs used and so on. Tags are handled using the &GStreamer; tagging system. Stream-info can be retrieved from a GstPad. Stream information can most easily be read by reading them from a GstPad. This has already been discussed before in . Therefore, we will skip it here. Tag reading is remarkably simple in &GStreamer; Every element supports the found-tag signal, which will be fired each the time the element reads tags from the stream. A GstBin will conveniently forward tags found by its childs. Therefore, in most applications, you will only need to connect to the found-tag signal on the top-most bin in your pipeline, and you will automatically retrieve all tags from the stream. Note, however, that the found-tag might be fired multiple times and by multiple elements in the pipeline. It is the application's responsibility to put all those tags together and display them to the user in a nice, coherent way. WRITEME