Chapter 4. Elements

The most important object in GStreamer for the application programmer is the GstElement object.

4.1. What is an element ?

An element is the basic building block for the media pipeline. All the different high-level components you are going to use are derived from GstElement. This means that a lot of functions you are going to use operate on objects of this class.

Elements, from the perspective of GStreamer, are viewed as "black boxes" with a number of different aspects. One of these aspects is the presence of "pads" (see Chapter 5), or link points. This terminology arises from soldering; pads are where wires can be attached.