Gstreamer Daemon - building a media server in under 30 minutes

GStreamer is modular, extensible and flexible - but not easy to properly use the GStreamer API. GStreamer provides all the necessary capabilities to build a fully functional production quality multimedia server, but getting it right requires good framework understanding, GLib/GObject handling and in most cases good debugging skills. A bad dynamic pipeline handling can result in unexpected behaviours or even complete pipeline stalls. GStreamer Daemon is an OpenSource project by Ridgerun that encapsulates GStreamer complexity in a standalone process, exposing a simple high-level API for real-time multimedia handling.

Pipelines can be created in a fashion similar to gst-launch. decoupling the streamer media logic from the application logic, allows you to focus on what makes your product unique.

This talks demonstrates a fully functional media server being created in under 30 minutes using GStreamer Deamon. The server will be built in a NVIDIA Tegra X1 embedded platform using the built-in HW accelerated codecs. The media server state will be modified at runtime, along with different streams being safetly activated/deactivated, without the need of transcoding nor interrupting the rest of the streams. Camera capture, video recording, taking snapshots, network streaming and playback trick-play are easy using GStreamer Daemon.

David Soto is the Engineering Manager at RidgeRun and a senior embedded software engineer working on Linux and GStreamer since 2010. David has a master degree in digital signal processing and loves looking for efficient ways to get embedded systems running multimedia, computer vision and machine learning algorithms for broadcasting, security, consumer and medical products.