Is GStreamer a more secure alternative or does it just get a bit less attention than ffmpeg?

Any multimedia project trying to support a large number of formats, whose usage in the wild differs by orders of magnitude, is going to have code of varying quality (although quality is not strictly correlated with usage: age and complexity are also big factors, among others). GStreamer puts plugins into different categories (-good, -bad, etc.) based on things like the maturity of the code, which helps you judge what risks you are taking. With FFmpeg it is harder to know which formats are more likely to have issues. Of course GStreamer can use FFmpeg, in which case you will also have all of FFmpeg's problems.

In both cases you are best off restricting things to what you actually use.

▲

WD-42 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

From what I understand gstreamer is more about building complex pipelines and plugins, ffmpeg is better at playing some obscure 20 year old video format extremely efficiently so you can watch it compiled for a potato.

Different cases really I think both are good.

	▲	hackernudes 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's not really true. Ffmpeg is a Swiss army knife for anything related to digital multimedia (old and new). It is broken into a few libraries but doesn't really have plugins. Gstreamer has a different model, chaining together plugins. Lots of overlap, but I think Gstreamer only has real traction because some silicon vendors use it.

▲

hugmynutus 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

GStreamer is just a different front end to ffmpeg.

ffmpeg's core functionality (encode, decode, streams, pipes, channels) are all implemented in `libav` which gstreamer links against.

	▲	harrall 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		GStreamer doesn’t use ffmpeg’s pipeline at all. It implements a much more advanced directed graph with disconnect, connection and pad negotiation. You can dynamically swap out the entire filter graph during live playback with zero disruption. Swap feeds, outputs, effects… all at runtime. ffmpeg and other media frameworks (Windows Media Foundation, Apple’s AVFramwork) only support static pipelines. You can use “switcher” components but the inputs are still static. GStreamer is extremely special. The only thing that comes close was Microsoft’s DirectShow, which has since been replaced with Media Foundation which can’t do it. And while DirectShow did support it, it was fragile because many 3rd party filters did not support dynamic configuration. GStreamer does use ffmpeg, but it just wraps the core encoder/decoder/filter code and discards the streams/graph/pipe part of ffmpeg.

▲

wmf 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Doesn't GStreamer mostly use ffmpeg plugins?

▲

ranger_danger 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In my experience it's mainly run by very grumpy and opinionated Europeans who take pride in having bugs old enough to drink.