GStreamer is a powerful multimedia framework with over 30 libraries and more than 1600 elements in 230 plugins providing a wide variety of functionality. This makes it possible to build a huge variety of applications, however it also makes it tricky to ship in a constrained device. Luckily, most applications only use a subset of this functionality, and up until now there wasn't an easy way to generate a build with just enough GStreamer for a specific application.

Thanks to major changes introduced recently to the GStreamer build system, you can now use it to generate a minimal, custom GStreamer build, tailored to a specific application, or set of applications.

When building embedded systems, there is often a need to do some sort of multimedia processing, and up to now, this often resulted in needing to re-write an entirely custom application, which can be time consuming and error prone. Being able to use an existing, extensively debugged and optimized framework makes it possible to reduce development time, and with this new work, we can now make it fit in the available storage space.

These changes are already available upstream and should be available in the next major release (1.20) of GStreamer.