Installing GStreamer on Linux for application development

GStreamer is a library for constructing graphs of media-handling components. The applications it supports range from simple Ogg/Vorbis playback, audio/video streaming to complex audio (mixing) and video (non-linear editing) processing.

In this post will we list the packages you will require to install on your ubuntu machine to get started with gstreamer application development.

$ sudo apt-get install gstreamer-tools

$ sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-good

$ sudo apt-get install libgstreamer0.10-dev

Now, lets execute simple gstreamer init program as below,

$ vim hello_gstinit.c

#include <stdio.h>
#include <gst/gst.h>

int main (int argc, char *argv[]) {
    const gchar *nano_str;
    guint major, minor, micro, nano;

    gst_init (&argc, &argv);

    gst_version (&major, &minor, &micro, &nano);

    if (nano == 1)
        nano_str = "(CVS)";
    else if (nano == 2)
        nano_str = "(Prerelease)";
    else
        nano_str = "";

    printf ("This program is linked against GStreamer %d.%d.%d %s\n", major, minor, micro, nano_str);

return 0;
}

$ gcc -o hello_gstinit hello_gstinit.c -I /usr/include/gstreamer-0.10/ -I /usr/include/glib-2.0/ -I /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/glib-2.0/include/ -I /usr/include/libxml2/ -lgstreamer-0.10

Now, if everything is well, you will get an executable as, hello_gstinit which if you run as below, might show something like below,

$ ./hello_gstinit
This program is linked against GStreamer 0.10.36

$ sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-good

$ sudo apt-get install libgstreamer0.10-dev