Usage

A playbin element can be created just like any other element using gst_element_factory_make(). The file/URI to play should be set via the "uri" property. This must be an absolute URI, relative file paths are not allowed. Example URIs are file:///home/joe/movie.avi or http://www.joedoe.com/foo.ogg

Playbin is a GstPipeline. It will notify the application of everything that's happening (errors, end of stream, tags found, state changes, etc.) by posting messages on its GstBus. The application needs to watch the bus.

Playback can be initiated by setting the element to PLAYING state using gst_element_set_state(). Note that the state change will take place in the background in a separate thread, when the function returns playback is probably not happening yet and any errors might not have occured yet. Applications using playbin should ideally be written to deal with things completely asynchroneous.

When playback has finished (an EOS message has been received on the bus) or an error has occured (an ERROR message has been received on the bus) or the user wants to play a different track, playbin should be set back to READY or NULL state, then the "uri" property should be set to the new location and then playbin be set to PLAYING state again.

Seeking can be done using gst_element_seek_simple() or gst_element_seek() on the playbin element. Again, the seek will not be executed instantaneously, but will be done in a background thread. When the seek call returns the seek will most likely still be in process. An application may wait for the seek to finish (or fail) using gst_element_get_state() with -1 as the timeout, but this will block the user interface and is not recommended at all.

Applications may query the current position and duration of the stream via gst_element_query_position() and gst_element_query_duration() and setting the format passed to GST_FORMAT_TIME. If the query was successful, the duration or position will have been returned in units of nanoseconds.

Advanced Usage: specifying the audio and video sink

By default, if no audio sink or video sink has been specified via the "audio-sink" or "video-sink" property, playbin will use the autoaudiosink and autovideosink elements to find the first-best available output method. This should work in most cases, but is not always desirable. Often either the user or application might want to specify more explicitly what to use for audio and video output.

If the application wants more control over how audio or video should be output, it may create the audio/video sink elements itself (for example using gst_element_factory_make()) and provide them to playbin using the "audio-sink" or "video-sink" property.

GNOME-based applications, for example, will usually want to create gconfaudiosink and gconfvideosink elements and make playbin use those, so that output happens to whatever the user has configured in the GNOME Multimedia System Selector confinguration dialog.

The sink elements do not necessarily need to be ready-made sinks. It is possible to create container elements that look like a sink to playbin, but in reality contain a number of custom elements linked together. This can be achieved by creating a GstBin and putting elements in there and linking them, and then creating a sink GstGhostPad for the bin and pointing it to the sink pad of the first element within the bin. This can be used for a number of purposes, for example to force output to a particular format or to modify or observe the data before it is output.

It is also possible to 'suppress' audio and/or video output by using 'fakesink' elements (or capture it from there using the fakesink element's "handoff" signal, which, nota bene, is fired from the streaming thread!).

Retrieving Tags and Other Meta Data

Most of the common meta data (artist, title, etc.) can be retrieved by watching for TAG messages on the pipeline's bus (see above).

Other more specific meta information like width/height/framerate of video streams or samplerate/number of channels of audio streams can be obtained using the "stream-info" property, which will return a GList of stream info objects, one for each stream. These are opaque objects that can only be accessed via the standard GObject property interface, ie. g_object_get(). Each stream info object has the following properties:

Stream information from the "stream-info" property is best queried once playbin has changed into PAUSED or PLAYING state (which can be detected via a state-changed message on the GstBus where old_state=READY and new_state=PAUSED), since before that the list might not be complete yet or not contain all available information (like language-codes).

Buffering

switch (GST_MESSAGE_TYPE (msg)) {
  case GST_MESSAGE_BUFFERING: {
    gint percent = 0;
    gst_message_parse_buffering (msg, &percent);
    g_print ("Buffering (%%u percent done)", percent);
    break;
  }
  ...
}

Embedding the video window in your application

Specifying which CD/DVD device to use

Examples

gst-launch -v playbin uri=file:///path/to/somefile.avi

gst-launch -v playbin uri=cdda://4

gst-launch -v playbin uri=dvd://1

struct GstPlayBin

struct GstPlayBin;

High-level player element

The "audio-sink" property

  "audio-sink"               GstElement*           : Read / Write

the audio output element to use (NULL = default sink).

The "frame" property

  "frame"                    GstBuffer*            : Read

The last frame (NULL = no video available).

The "subtitle-font-desc" property

  "subtitle-font-desc"       gchar*                : Write

Pango font description of font to be used for subtitle rendering.

Default value: NULL

The "video-sink" property

  "video-sink"               GstElement*           : Read / Write

the video output element to use (NULL = default sink).

The "vis-plugin" property

  "vis-plugin"               GstElement*           : Read / Write

the visualization element to use (NULL = none).

The "volume" property

  "volume"                   gdouble               : Read / Write

Get or set the current audio stream volume. 1.0 means 100%, 0.0 means mute. This uses a linear volume scale.

Allowed values: [0,10]

Default value: 1

The "connection-speed" property

  "connection-speed"         guint                 : Read / Write

Network connection speed in kbps (0 = unknown).

Default value: 0