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Tools from Gstreamer

Gstreamer, the multimedia process framework, has some simple tools to use its feature without using API.

NameDescription
gst-inspect-1.0Print out information of Gstreamer plugins
gst-launch-1.0Run Gstreamer pipeline built in string format

How to get the tools​

Run installer with an option -InstallGstTools for Windows and --install-gst-tools for Linux to install these tools with the other components of Sensing-Dev SDK. See the setup guide for the detail.

List available plugins (gst-inspect-1.0)​

gst-inspect-1.0 displays the list of all available plugins on your machine. If you install Sensing-Dev with installer script (and set up the environment varialble) by following setup guide, you see aravissrc and gendcseparator which are gst-plugins of Aravis and GenDC respectively. 

aravis:  aravissrc: Aravis Video Source
gendcseparator:  gendcseparator: GenDCSeparator
staticelements:  bin: Generic bin
staticelements:  pipeline: Pipeline object
why it does not work

If you don't see the expected plugins on the list or see WARNING "Failed to load plugin", it might be...

  • Some SDK components have version conflict by installing different installer.
  • Environment variables are not set (Particularly for Linux).
    • GST_PLUGIN_PATH
    • PATH: Windows
    • LD_LIBRARY_PATH: Linux

Display information of a plugins/elements (gst-inspect-1.0)​

gst-inspect-1.0 <name of element or plugin> displays information of a particular Gstreamer plugins or a particular element. The following example shows the partial information about gendcseparator. You can see Factory Details, Plugin Details, and Pad Templates and Element Properties/Signals which help building pipeline.

$ gst-inspect-1.0.exe gendcseparator
...
Pad Templates:
  SRC template: 'component_src%u'
    Availability: Sometimes
    Capabilities:
      ANY

  SINK template: 'sink'
    Availability: Always
    Capabilities:
      ANY

  SRC template: 'src'
    Availability: Always
    Capabilities:
      ANY
...

Element Properties:
  name                : The name of the object
                        flags: readable, writable
                        String. Default: "gendcseparator0"
  parent              : The parent of the object
                        flags: readable, writable
                        Object of type "GstObject"
  silent              : Produce verbose output ?
                        flags: readable, writable
                        Boolean. Default: true

...

Run a pipeline (gst-launch-1.0)​

In most cases, we use the GStreamer API to build and run a pipeline, but gst-launch-1.0 allows us to run a pipeline as a string, where each element is concatenated with !. See the detail in gstreamer tutorial.

The following example obtains sensor data from aravissrc (the source element of the Aravis GStreamer plugin) and saves the data into output%d.bin using multifilesink (the sink element of the multifile plugin).

gst-launch-1.0 aravissrc camera-name=<camera name> ! multifilesink location=output%d.bin

gst-launch-1.0 example