Synchronised multi-room multimedia playback and synchronised live media processing and mixing with G
Channel: Linux.conf.au 2016 -- Geelong, Australia
Date: 2016-02-13

Sebastian Dröge
https://linux.conf.au/schedule/30160/view_talk
Many use cases today require synchronised multimedia handling between several,
independent devices, possibly in different rooms. These requirements arise in
consumer use cases, like multi-room playback of videos on TVs, mobile devices
and other parts of a home entertainment system, to allow the user to switch
between rooms without interrupting his multimedia experience. Similar
requirements also arise in industrial and professional use cases, for example
for building video walls as used for digital signage or control rooms, or for
distributed live media processing and mixing in professional media production
and editing scenarios.

In this talk we will discuss how the flexibility of the GStreamer multimedia
framework allows to implement these use cases, and which features are already
provided to make it very simple to develop such applications. We will briefly
introduce what GStreamer is and how data flow handling and synchronisation
works. After this we will discuss how various open standards like RTP/RTSP and
PTP or NTP can be leveraged to implement these use cases, while providing
interoperability with other solutions. We will discuss how these are
integrated into GStreamer and which challenges exist.


GStreamer is a Free Software multimedia framework, based on the concept of
media processing pipelines. Pipelines in GStreamer are built from small,
composable components, like codecs, filters, sources (inputs) and sinks
(outputs). These components are combined to bigger, more complex building
blocks doing more high-level tasks. GStreamer is nowadays used in many areas,
from phones and desktop applications to TVs and airplanes.