&GStreamer; is a framework for creating streaming media applications. The fundamental design comes from the video pipeline at Oregon Graduate Institute, as well as some ideas from DirectShow. &GStreamer;'s development framework makes it possible to write any type of streaming multimedia application. The &GStreamer; framework is designed to make it easy to write applications that handle audio or video or both. It isn't restricted to audio and video, and can process any kind of data flow. The pipeline design is made to have little overhead above what the applied filters induce. This makes &GStreamer; a good framework for designing even high-end audio applications which put high demands on latency. One of the the most obvious uses of &GStreamer; is using it to build a media player. &GStreamer; already includes components for building a media player that can support a very wide variety of formats, including MP3, Ogg/Vorbis, MPEG-1/2, AVI, Quicktime, mod, and more. &GStreamer;, however, is much more than just another media player. Its main advantages are that the pluggable components can be mixed and matched into arbitrary pipelines so that it's possible to write a full-fledged video or audio editing application. The framework is based on plugins that will provide the various codec and other functionality. The plugins can be linked and arranged in a pipeline. This pipeline defines the flow of the data. Pipelines can also be edited with a GUI editor and saved as XML so that pipeline libraries can be made with a minimum of effort. The &GStreamer; core function is to provide a framework for plugins, data flow and media type handling/negotiation. It also provides an API to write applications using the various plugins. Specifically, &GStreamer; provides an API for multimedia applications a plugin architecture a pipeline architecture a mechanism for media type handling/negociation over 150 plug-ins a set of tools &GStreamer; plug-ins could be classified into protocols handling sources: for audio and video (involves protocol plugins) formats: parsers, formaters, muxers, demuxers, metadata, subtitles codecs: coders and decoders filters: converters, mixers, effects, ... sinks: for audio and video (involves protocol plugins)

&GStreamer; is packaged into gstreamer: the core package gst-plugins-base: an essential exemplary set of elements gst-plugins-good: a set of good-quality plug-ins under LGPL gst-plugins-ugly: a set of good-quality plug-ins that might pose distribution problems gst-plugins-bad: a set of plug-ins that need more quality gst-python: the python bindings a few others packages