Quick-start guide to gst-uninstalled for GStreamer 1.x

Update: gst-build is the current way to build GStreamer for developement. I’m leaving the post up for posterity, but other than the note on getting dependencies, you should not be using this.

One of the first tools that you should get if you’re hacking with GStreamer or want to play with the latest version without doing evil things to your system is probably the gst-uninstalled script. It’s the equivalent of Python’s virtualenv for hacking on GStreamer. :)

The documentation around getting this set up is a bit frugal, though, so here’s my attempt to clarify things. I was going to put this on our wiki, but that’s a bit search-engine unfriendly, so probably easiest to just keep it here. The setup I outline below can probably be automated further, and comments/suggestions are welcome.

• First, get build dependencies for GStreamer core and plugins on your distribution. Commands to do this on some popular distributions follow. This will install a lot of packages, but should mean that you won’t have to play find-the-plugin-dependency for your local build.
• Fedora: $ sudo yum-builddep gstreamer1-*
• Debian/Ubuntu: $ sudo apt-get build-dep gstreamer1.0-plugins-{base,good,bad,ugly}
• Gentoo: having the GStreamer core and plugin packages should suffice

• Others: drop me a note with the command for your favourite distro, and I’ll add it here

• Next, check out the code (by default, it will turn up in ~/gst/master)

• $ curl https://cgit.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gstreamer/plain/scripts/create-uninstalled-setup.sh | sh

• Ignore the pointers to documentation that you see — they’re currently defunct

• Now put the gst-uninstalled script somewhere you can get to it easily:

• $ ln -sf ~/gst/master/gstreamer/scripts/gst-uninstalled ~/bin/gst-master

• (the -master suffix for the script is important to how the script works)

• Enter the uninstalled environment:

• $ ~/bin/gst-master

• (this puts you in the directory with all the checkouts, and sets up a bunch of environment variables to use your uninstalled setup – check with echo $GST_PLUGIN_PATH)

• Time to build

• $ ./gstreamer/scripts/git-update.sh

• Take it out for a spin

• $ gst-inspect-1.0 filesrc
• $ gst-launch-1.0 playbin uri=file:///path/to/some/file

• $ gst-discoverer-1.0 /path/to/some/file

• That’s it! Some tips:

• Remember that you need to run ~/bin/gst-master to enter the environment for each new shell
• If you start up a GStreamer app from your system in this environment, it will use your uninstalled libraries and plugins
• You can and should periodically update you tree by rerunning the git-update.sh script
• To run gdb on gst-launch, you need to do something like:
• $ libtool --mode=execute gdb --args gstreamer/tools/gst-launch-1.0 videotestsrc ! videoconvert ! xvimagesink
• I find it useful to run cscope on the top-level tree, and use that for quick code browsing

Update: Fixed create-uninstalled.sh link to use https (thanks to Victor for pointing this out).