“How did the GStreamer project start?”
“Erik: Well, I was spending a lot of time thinking about how to
fix the OGI pipeline, and ended up deciding to just create my own.
From there it started maturing, and more and more features were
added. Then people like Wim started working on it, and it grew into
the monster it is today.”
“Wim: I wanted to do a NLE (non-linear video editing
application), so I joined the Trinity project. It became clear that
we needed a solid multimedia library in order to be able to handle
all the things we wanted to do. I was very impressed with the first
GStreamer version (0.0.9) and I almost immediately started to add
various video plug-ins for mpeg1/mpeg2/avi etc.”
“Can you explain us the “magic” behind GStreamer? How different
is it from other multimedia frameworks available for Linux?”
“Wim: First of all, GStreamer is a real framework. This means
that it can be used for a generic media player as well as serve as
the core of large multimedia render farms. The GStreamer core is
built in such a way that it is media agnostic, it doesn’t know or
care what media data it is handling. The interpretation of the
media types is entirely handled by the plug-ins.”
“This allows us to handle all possible media data you can
imagine and allows us to create a new plug-in that integrates
smoothly with the framework whenever a new multimedia types becomes
available.”
Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.
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