The Ventana Family of Single Board Computers from Gateworks offers a multitude of video and audio interfaces to meet the demands of new multimedia embedded systems. The primary method of accessing these interfaces is through software by the name of GStreamer. GStreamer is an open-source library that makes the handling of multimedia data more simple usingpipelines of elements that operate on multimedia data buffers. GStreamer can be used directly on the command line of a Ventana Single Board computer for quick prototyping and development with the gst-launch test application. For example, to play a video file stored on a USB flash drive connected to a Gateworks single board computer, the following GStreamer command would be used:
gst-launch filesrc location=/media/sda1/big_buck_bunny_720p_surround.avi ! decodebin2 ! mfw_v4lsink device=/dev/video16
Using GStreamer, an application can benefit from a large library of OpenSource elements that use well known algorithms to operate on multimedia data, including the elements provided by the fsl-gstreamer package that take advantage of the i.MX6 hardware acceleration. Customers can create custom applications that utilize GStreamer (above and beyond what gst-launch can provide) through the Gateworks SDK. GStreamer is a very powerful tool with thousands of options and plugins. Gateworks has created a wiki page that provides some simple examples to make getting started quickly easier on the Ventana Single Board Computers. Follow this link to the wiki for more examples and tutorials: Gateworks GStreamer Software Wiki Page