GStreamer

GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework written in the C programming language with the type system based on GObject.

GStreamer allows a programmer to create a variety of media-handling components, including simple audio playback, audio and video playback, recording, streaming and editing. The pipeline design serves as a base to create many types of multimedia applications such as video editors, streaming media broadcasters, and media players.

Designed to be cross-platform, it is known to work on Linux (x86, PowerPC and ARM), Solaris (Intel and SPARC), macOS, Microsoft Windows and OS/400. GStreamer has bindings for programming-languages like Python, C++, Perl, GNU Guile (guile), and Ruby. GStreamer is free software, licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Installation

Install the gstreamer package.

To make GStreamer useful, install the plugins packages you require. See official documentation for list of features in each plugin.

gst-libav - Libav-based plugin containing many decoders and encoders.
gst-plugins-bad - Plugins that need more quality, testing or documentation.
gst-plugins-base - Essential exemplary set of elements.
gst-plugins-good - Good-quality plugins under LGPL license.
gst-plugins-ugly - Good-quality plugins that might pose distribution problems.
gst-plugin-libde265^AUR - libde265 plugin (an open h.265 video codec implementation) for gstreamer.

Integration

PulseAudio

PulseAudio support is provided by the gst-plugins-good package.

PipeWire

PipeWire support is provided by the gst-plugin-pipewire package.

KDE / Phonon integration

See Phonon.

Hardware video acceleration

See Hardware video acceleration.

GStreamer will automatically detect and use the correct API [1]. Depending on the system install:

gstreamer-vaapi for VA-API support.
gst-plugins-bad and nvidia-utils for NVDECODE/NVENCODE support.

Ignore driver whitelist

GStreamer uses a whitelist of VA-API drivers. To ignore the whitelist and allow support for other drivers like intel-media-driver, set GST_VAAPI_ALL_DRIVERS=1 as environment variable.

Verify VA-API support

To verify VA-API support:

$ gst-inspect-1.0 vaapi

Plugin Details:
  Name                     vaapi
  Description              VA-API based elements
  Filename                 /usr/lib/gstreamer-1.0/libgstvaapi.so
  Version                  1.16.2
  License                  LGPL
  Source module            gstreamer-vaapi
  Binary package           gstreamer-vaapi
  Origin URL               https://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=GStreamer

  vaapijpegdec: VA-API JPEG decoder
  vaapimpeg2dec: VA-API MPEG2 decoder
  vaapih264dec: VA-API H264 decoder
  vaapivc1dec: VA-API VC1 decoder
  vaapih265dec: VA-API H265 decoder
  vaapipostproc: VA-API video postprocessing
  vaapidecodebin: VA-API Decode Bin
  vaapisink: VA-API sink
  vaapih265enc: VA-API H265 encoder
  vaapih264enc: VA-API H264 encoder

  10 features:
  +-- 10 elements

Verify NVDECODE/NVENCODE support

To verify NVDECODE/NVENCODE support:

$ gst-inspect-1.0 nvcodec

Plugin Details:
  Name                     nvcodec
  Description              GStreamer NVCODEC plugin
  Filename                 /usr/lib/gstreamer-1.0/libgstnvcodec.so
  Version                  1.18.2
  License                  LGPL
  Source module            gst-plugins-bad
  Source release date      2020-12-06
  Binary package           GStreamer Bad Plugins (Arch Linux)
  Origin URL               https://archlinux.org/

  nvh265enc: NVENC HEVC Video Encoder
  nvh264enc: NVENC H.264 Video Encoder
  nvvp9dec: NVDEC vp9 Video Decoder
  nvvp8dec: NVDEC vp8 Video Decoder
  nvh265dec: NVDEC h265 Video Decoder
  nvh265sldec: NVDEC H.265 Stateless Decoder
  nvjpegdec: NVDEC jpeg Video Decoder
  nvh264dec: NVDEC h264 Video Decoder
  nvh264sldec: NVDEC H.264 Stateless Decoder
  nvmpeg4videodec: NVDEC mpeg4video Video Decoder
  nvmpeg2videodec: NVDEC mpeg2video Video Decoder
  nvmpegvideodec: NVDEC mpegvideo Video Decoder

  12 features:
  +-- 12 elements