GstConfig Configuration options This describes the configuration options for GStreamer. When building GStreamer there are a lot of parts (known internally as "subsystems" ) that can be disabled for various reasons. The most common reasons are speed and size, which is important because GStreamer is designed to run on embedded systems. If a subsystem is disabled, most of this changes are done in an API compatible way, so you don't need to adapt your code in most cases. It is never done in an ABI compatible way though. So if you want to disable a suybsystem, you have to rebuild all programs depending on GStreamer, too. If a subsystem is disabled in GStreamer, a value is defined in <gst/gst.h>. You can check this if you do subsystem-specific stuff. &hash;ifndef GST_DISABLE_GST_DEBUG /* do stuff specific to the debugging subsystem */ &hash;endif /* GST_DISABLE_GST_DEBUG */ If this is defined, the debugging subsystem is disabled and debugging messages are not output. Under Windows it permits to export variables from a DLL, otherwise it just means extern. Under Windows it permits to automatically export the plugin definition, otherwise it just defines as nothing.