So in my last post (way back when) I was talking about transcoding some video. I wanted to use GStreamer to do the job but HandBreak was so much easier (pretty cool app too). So after I got the transcoding working with HandBreak I started playing around with GStreamer to see what it would take to code up a small app to do the job.

The first thing is just to code up a little bit of C to get the video playing. The GStreamer part here is pretty simple. It’s just like the gst-launch command I laid out in my last post. I’ve added a few bells and whistles to get command line parameters and to do some input validation. I’m using as much glib as I can for practice.

The result is a pretty short (for C) application that is a bare-bones GStreamer media player. Naturally you’d want a few additional things from a media player but that’s not our end goal. We want to take the playbin (or something like it) and hook it up to another pipeline of our own design that will encode the video & audio for our specific purposes. This is what’s coming up … soon hopefully. Honestly with the class I’m currently taking at SU it may be a while.

For now read the code and enjoy. It’s available for download below. I even made a Makefile for ya.

Download: gst-play-min.tar.gz