+ THE BAD
+
+ --- "That an accusation?"
+
+No perfectly groomed moustache or any amount of fine clothing is going to
+cover up the truth - these plug-ins are Bad with a capital B.
+They look fine on the outside, and might even appear to get the job done, but
+at the end of the day they're a black sheep. Without a golden-haired angel
+to watch over them, they'll probably land in an unmarked grave at the final
+showdown.
+
+Don't bug us about their quality - exercise your Free Software rights,
+patch up the offender and send us the patch on the fastest steed you can
+steal from the Confederates. Because you see, in this world, there's two
+kinds of people, my friend: those with loaded guns and those who dig.
+You dig.
+
+The Lowdown
+-----------
+
+ --- "I've never seen so many plug-ins wasted so badly."
+
+GStreamer Plug-ins has grown so big that it's hard to separate the wheat from
+the chaff. Also, distributors have brought up issues about the legal status
+of some of the plug-ins we ship. To remedy this, we've divided the previous
+set of available plug-ins into four modules:
+
+- gst-plugins-base: a small and fixed set of plug-ins, covering a wide range
+ of possible types of elements; these are continuously kept up-to-date
+ with any core changes during the development series.
+
+ - We believe distributors can safely ship these plug-ins.
+ - People writing elements should base their code on these elements.
+ - These elements come with examples, documentation, and regression tests.
+
+- gst-plugins-good: a set of plug-ins that we consider to have good quality
+ code, correct functionality, our preferred license (LGPL for the plug-in
+ code, LGPL or LGPL-compatible for the supporting library).
+
+ - We believe distributors can safely ship these plug-ins.
+ - People writing elements should base their code on these elements.
+
+- gst-plugins-ugly: a set of plug-ins that have good quality and correct
+ functionality, but distributing them might pose problems. The license
+ on either the plug-ins or the supporting libraries might not be how we'd
+ like. The code might be widely known to present patent problems.
+
+ - Distributors should check if they want/can ship these plug-ins.
+ - People writing elements should base their code on these elements.
+
+- gst-plugins-bad: a set of plug-ins that aren't up to par compared to the
+ rest. They might be close to being good quality, but they're missing
+ something - be it a good code review, some documentation, a set of tests,
+ a real live maintainer, or some actual wide use.
+ If the blanks are filled in they might be upgraded to become part of
+ either gst-plugins-good or gst-plugins-ugly, depending on the other factors.
+
+ - If the plug-ins break, you can't complain - instead, you can fix the
+ problem and send us a patch, or bribe someone into fixing them for you.
+ - New contributors can start here for things to work on.
+
+PLATFORMS
+---------
+
+- Linux is of course fully supported
+- FreeBSD is reported to work; other BSDs should work too; same for Solaris
+- MacOS works, binary 1.x packages can be built using the cerbero build tool
+- Windows works; binary 1.x packages can be built using the cerbero build tool
+ - MSys/MinGW builds
+ - Microsoft Visual Studio builds are also available and supported
+- Android works, binary 1.x packages can be built using the cerbero build tool
+- iOS works
+
+INSTALLING FROM PACKAGES
+------------------------
+
+You should always prefer installing from packages first. GStreamer is
+well-maintained for a number of distributions, including Fedora, Debian,
+Ubuntu, Mandrake, Arch Linux, Gentoo, ...
+
+Only in cases where you:
+
+ - want to hack on GStreamer
+ - want to verify that a bug has been fixed
+ - do not have a sane distribution
+
+should you choose to build from source tarballs or git.
+
+Find more information about the various packages at
+
+ https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/download/
+
+COMPILING FROM SOURCE TARBALLS
+------------------------------
+
+- again, make sure that you really need to install from source!
+ If GStreamer is one of your first projects ever that you build from source,
+ consider taking on an easier project.
+
+- you need a recent version of Meson installed, see
+
+ http://mesonbuild.com/Getting-meson.html
+
+ and
+
+ https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gst-build/blob/master/README.md
+
+- run
+
+ meson build
+ ninja -C build
+
+ to build GStreamer.