Synchronised multi-room media playback and distributed live media processing and mixing with GStreamer

Many use cases today require synchronised multimedia handling between several, independent devices, possibly in different rooms. These requirements arise in consumer use cases, like multi-room playback of videos on TVs, mobile devices and other parts of a home entertainment system, to allow the user to switch between rooms without interrupting his multimedia experience. Similar requirements also arise in industrial and professional use cases, for example for building video walls as used for digital signage or control rooms, or for distributed live media processing and mixing in professional media production and editing scenarios.

In this talk we will discuss how the flexibility of the GStreamer multimedia framework allows to implement these use cases, and which features are already provided to make it very simple to develop such applications. We will briefly introduce how data flow handling and synchronisation works in GStreamer. After this we will discuss how various open standards like RTP/RTSP and PTP/NTP can be leveraged to implement these use cases, while providing interoperability with other solutions. We will discuss how these are integrated into GStreamer and which challenges exist.

Sebastian Dröge is a Free Software developer and one of the GStreamer maintainers and core developers. He has been involved with the project for almost 10 years now. He also contributes to various other Free Software projects, like Debian, GNOME and WebKit. While finishing his degree in computer sciences at the University of Paderborn in Germany, he started working as a contractor for GStreamer and related technologies.

Nowadays Sebastian is working at Centricular, a company providing consultancy services around GStreamer and Free Software in general.

Apart from multimedia related topics, Sebastian has an interest in digital signal processing, programming languages, machine learning, network protocols and distributed systems.