GStreamer
From Free net encyclopedia
GStreamer is a free software (LGPL) multimedia framework based on GObject. It is written in C and mainly developed on Unix to serve a host of multimedia applications, such as video editors, streaming media broadcasters, and of course media players. Designed to be cross-platform, it is known to work on GNU/Linux (x86, PowerPC and ARM), Solaris (x86 and SPARC), Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and OS/400.
The project was founded in 1999 by Erik Walthinsen and had many of its core design ideas taken from a research project at Oregon Graduate University. Wim Taymans joined the project soon thereafter and greatly expanded on many aspects of the system. Many others around the world have contributed to various degrees since then. The GStreamer logo was designed by Brock A. Frazier, working for an embedded linux company called RidgeRun, which also was the first corporate sponsor of GStreamer in the form of hiring Erik Walthinsen to develop methods for embedding GStreamer in smaller (cell-phone-class) devices.
It is a hosted project at freedesktop.org, and therefore aims to ameliorate interoperability and share technology between free desktops.
The GNOME desktop environment is the primary user of GStreamer technology and have included GStreamer since the 6th of Februrary 2003 when GNOME 2.2 was released, and encourages GNOME and GTK+ applications to use it for their multimedia features. Other applications are starting to use it as well, such as the KDE media player amaroK. It will most likely be the standard media framework of KDE4.
GStreamer is also being used in embedded devices like the Maemo environment from Nokia, which is found on the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet.
Apart from the small core library, GStreamer mostly consists of a collection of plugin libraries, which are dynamically loaded to support a wide spectrum of codecs, container formats and output drivers. Bindings are provided for programming languages like Python, [[C++]], Perl, GNU Guile and Ruby.
Applications
- amaroK
- Banshee
- BMPx
- Buzztard
- Flumotion
- Goobox
- JuK
- Kaffeine
- Muine
- Pitivi
- Sound Juicer
- Rhythmbox
- Thoggen
- Totem
External links
- GStreamer
- Fluendo S.L., software company employing many of the core GStreamer developers including project co-founder Wim Taymans.
- NextBit Computing, a software company that works on the GStreamer framework, on the plugins, and towards porting GStreamer to embedded platformsde:GStreamer