Lessons Learned: Transforming Our Video Management System with GStreamer

Abstract: Transforming Our Video Management System with GStreamer: In our journey to modernize and optimize our Video Management System (VMS), which currently manages more than 100000 cameras from various manufacturers, we've transitioned the foundation of our live RTSP camera streaming from a custom FFmpeg-based solution to GStreamer pipelines. Additionally, we have reengineered our offline video player, replacing its FFmpeg-based framework with GStreamer to unify and enhance our media processing workflow. Our application runs on Windows, where we’ve leveraged GStreamer’s rapidly evolving capabilities, particularly the Direct3D 11 (d3d11) plugins, to achieve efficient hardware-accelerated decoding and rendering. While the newer Direct3D 12 (d3d12) plugins have gained maturity since we began, our next step is to investigate and integrate them into our application to further improve performance and scalability. In this talk, we will share our experiences with migrating to GStreamer, the challenges involved in adapting a complex VMS system, our insights on using the d3d11 plugin suite on Windows, and the lessons we've learned along the way. We believe our story will resonate with others modernizing legacy systems and highlight the versatility of GStreamer in developing high-performance multimedia applications.