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Tutorials
Welcome to the GStreamer SDK Tutorials!
The following sections introduce a series of tutorials designed to help you learn how to use GStreamer, the multi-platform, modular, open-source, media streaming framework.
Prerequisites
Before following these tutorials, you need to set up your development environment according to your platform. If you have not done so yet, follow the appropriate link for Linux, Mac OS X or Windows and come back here afterwards.
The tutorials are currently written only in the C programming language,
so you need to be comfortable with it. Even though C is not an
Object-Oriented (OO) language per se, the GStreamer framework uses
GObjects, so some knowledge of OO concepts will come in handy.
Knowledge of the GObject and GLib libraries is not mandatory, but
will make the trip easier.
Source code
Every tutorial represents a self-contained project, with full source code in C (and eventually in other languages too). Source code snippets are introduced alongside the text, and the full code (with any other required files like makefiles or project files) is distributed with the SDK, as explained in the installation instructions.
A short note on GObject and GLib
GStreamer is built on top of the GObject (for object orientation) and
GLib (for common algorithms) libraries, which means that every now and
then you will have to call functions of these libraries. Even though the
tutorials will make sure that deep knowledge of these libraries is not
required, familiarity with them will certainly ease the process of
learning GStreamer.
You can always tell which library you are calling because all GStreamer
functions, structures and types have the gst_ prefix, whereas GLib and
GObject use g_.
Sources of documentation
You have the GObject and GLib reference guides, and, of course the
upstream GStreamer
documentation.
Structure
The tutorials are organized in sections, revolving about a common theme:
- Basic tutorials: Describe general topics required to understand the rest of tutorials in the GStreamer SDK.
- Playback tutorials: Explain everything you need to know to produce a media playback application using GStreamer.
- Android tutorials: Tutorials dealing with the few Android-specific topics you need to know.
- iOS tutorials: Tutorials dealing with the few iOS-specific topics you need to know.
If you cannot remember in which tutorial a certain GStreamer concept is explained, use the following:
Sample media
The audio and video clips used throughout these tutorials are all publicly available and the copyright remains with their respective authors. In some cases they have been re-encoded for demonstration purposes.