Chapter 14. Caps negotiation

Caps negotiation is the act of finding a media format (GstCaps) between elements that they can handle. This process in GStreamer can in most cases find an optimal solution for the complete pipeline. In this section we explain how this works.

14.1. Caps negotiation basics

In GStreamer, negotiation of the media format always follows the following simple rules:

In addition to the CAPS and RECONFIGURE event and the CAPS query, there is an ACCEPT_CAPS query to quickly check if a certain caps can be accepted by an element.

All negotiation follows these simple rules. Let's take a look at some typical uses cases and how negotiation happens.