]> Wim Taymans wim.taymans@chello.be This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later (the latest version is presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/ ) The first chapter of the book gives you an overview of GStreamer design goals. Chapter 2 rapidly covers the basics of GStreamer programming. In chapter 3 we will move on to the examples. Since GStreamer adheres to the GTK+ programming model, the reader is assumed to understand the basics of GTK+. For a gentle introduction to GTK+, you may wish to read the GTK+ Tutorial or Eric Harlow's book Developing Linux Applications with GTK+ and GDK. &INTRO; &MOTIVATION; &GOALS; We will first describe the basics of the GStreamer programming by introducing the different objects needed to create a media pipeline. We will use a visual representation of these objects so that we can visualize the more complex pipelines you will learn to build later on. &ELEMENTS; &CONNECTIONS; &BINS; &BUFFERS; &STATES; With the basic concepts out of the way, you're ready to start building a full-scale GStreamer application. This part of the book walks you through the creation of a generic application skeleton: a source tree using automake and autoconf, argument parsing, session management, internationalization, the main window, dialogs, toolbars, and menubars. Many examples in Part 2 come from a simple application called "GnomeHello"; the source code for this application is included in the back of the book. Of course the "meat" of the application is up to you; but in Part 3 of the book we'll cover a range of library features you can use to develop it. Wanna know more? Just say how we use it... A lot of text will follow...