1 <chapter id="cha-intro">
2 <title>Introduction</title>
4 This chapter gives you an overview of the technologies described in this
8 <sect1 id="sec-intro-what">
9 <title>What is GStreamer?</title>
11 GStreamer is a framework for creating streaming media applications.
12 The fundamental design comes from the video pipeline at Oregon Graduate
13 Institute, as well as some ideas from DirectShow.
17 GStreamer's development framework makes it possible to write any
18 streaming multimedia application. The framework includes several
19 components to build a full featured media player capable of playing
20 MPEG1, MPEG2, AVI, MP3, WAV, AU, ...
24 The framework is based on plug-ins that will provide the various codec
25 and other functionality. The plugins can be connected and arranged in
26 a pipeline. This pipeline defines the flow of the data.
30 This book is about GStreamer from a developer's point of view; it describes
31 how to write a GStreamer application using the GStreamer libraries and tools.