GStreamer tries to integrate closely with operating systems (such as Linux and UNIX-like operating systems, OS X or Windows) and desktop environments (such as GNOME or KDE). In this chapter, we'll mention some specific techniques to integrate your application with your operating system or desktop environment of choice.
GStreamer provides a basic set of elements that are useful when integrating with Linux or a UNIX-like operating system.
For audio input and output, GStreamer provides input and output elements for several audio subsystems. Amongst others, GStreamer includes elements for ALSA (alsasrc, alsasink), OSS (osssrc, osssink) Pulesaudio (pulsesrc, pulsesink) and Sun audio (sunaudiosrc, sunaudiomixer, sunaudiosink).
For video input, GStreamer contains source elements for Video4linux2 (v4l2src, v4l2element, v4l2sink).
For video output, GStreamer provides elements for output to X-windows (ximagesink), Xv-windows (xvimagesink; for hardware-accelerated video), direct-framebuffer (dfbimagesink) and openGL image contexts (glsink).