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I'm implementing a lecture-capture project for a local university. Multiple video streams will arrive at one PC: the presenter's desktop slides, a video camera image of the presenter himself and optionally a digital whiteboard capture. These incoming streams will be managed by a desktop application that displays, transcodes/mixes and eventually saves them to disk. There will be some configuration options because the material can be distributed in various ways: as a Flash application on a DVD, as an online Flash application or as a video-on-demand stream for Windows Media Player.

This application should work on Windows. Optionally it can support other platforms, but it doesn't seem to be high priority.

Both GStreamer and DirectShow seem capable of providing the underlying technology. I have a little experience with GStreamer on Linux, and I like its design, so I'm inclined to use it for this project. However, I don't know how well it is supported on Windows. I couldn't find any recent docs on how to build GStreamer on Windows. So I'm afraid I'll get stuck somewhere in the process.

DirectShow seems like a safer option because it is much more widely used and there is much more documentation available for it on the internet.

Does anyone here have experience using GStreamer on Windows? Does it work well? Are there certain issues that I should be aware of?

Edit
I discovered the GStreamer OSSBuilds website and was able to quickly implement a simple video player (based on the 'playbin' element) with it. So I think I'll pursue the GStreamer path a little further.

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  • @Macke See my own reply for that.
    – StackedCrooked
    Jun 20, 2012 at 19:11

4 Answers 4

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Ok, I'll answer this question myself. The simple answer is: GStreamer! I've experienced no difficulties thus far. To make it work on Windows you need to use the GStreamer Winbuilds.

Update (6 months later)

Actually I burned myself a little bit on this bet. Later in the project the client specified that the WMV9 codec (VC-1) had to be supported. Since WMV9 encoders are only supported on Microsft platforms this wasn't possible to implement in a GStreamer-based solution. So maybe DirectShow would have been the right choice.

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  • Why on Earth would they require WMV9? H.264 is better in just about every way; quality, compression, cross-platform support, etc, etc. Anyway, don't give up on GStreamer just yet! It wouldn't be that hard to implement a GStreamer wrapper for the WMV9 codec. Then you can still keep your code portable, and support other codecs if absolutely necessary.
    – gavinb
    Aug 29, 2010 at 7:36
  • @gavinb, I was also considering writing a WMV9 wrapper for GStreamer. However, for various reasons the atmosphere at that job went sour so quickly that I just fled the place. I've been happily hacking at another place for almost half a year now.
    – StackedCrooked
    Aug 30, 2010 at 8:29
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    ffmpeg has a wmv9 plugin. The element for gstreamer is ffenc_wmv3.
    – Jonathan Henson
    Feb 24, 2012 at 16:26
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    Might I ask how you get at a capture device using gstreamer? All the solutions I've looked at so far (VLC, ffmpeg et al) for recording incoming video data on Windows are actually high-level solutions coded on top of the DirectShow API, but gstreamer doesn't seem to hook into that. So, I'm unsure what element to use as the data source- any suggestions?
    – Johansensen
    Aug 2, 2012 at 3:01
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Last time I worked with GStreamer in windows was quite tedious.

If you take this way, you should be willing to spend a lot of time dealing with runtimes hell and other compilation issues. First thing you need to evaluate is which compiler/runtime you will use.

If portability is not a must, I whould take the easy way. DirectShow.

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    A few hours ago I discovered a website where Windows builds are posted for GStreamer: gstreamer-winbuild.ylatuya.es/doku.php. I was able to quickly implement a simple "playbin"-based videoplayer. It seems that these builds may eliminate many of the pains.
    – StackedCrooked
    Dec 16, 2009 at 23:25
  • Yes, that is the visual studio option. It would be ok if you don't need to use any other gstreamer compiled library (fluendo plugins, etc...) that could be compiled against other runtime.
    – Fernando N.
    Dec 17, 2009 at 7:57
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Consider looking at VLC. http://www.videolan.org/ I second what fnieto said about compilation hell with GStreamer on Winbdows (done it recently). But if you familiar with unix environment that might be not big trouble with Cygwin ot MSYS. But take in account that you probably will not get readily available and reliable hardware support with GStreamer on Windows as you might get with Media Foundation or DirectShow. Microsoft Media Center iTV framework worth looking at too.

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avisynth might provide for easy mixing of streams, and can take directshow input.

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