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