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I m implementing a lecture-capture project for a local university. Multiple video streams will arrive at one PC: the presenter s desktop slides, a video camera image of the presenter himself and optionally a digital whiteboard capture. These incoming streams will be managed by a desktop application that displays, transcodes/mixes and eventually saves them to disk. There will be some configuration options because the material can be distributed in various ways: as a Flash application on a DVD, as an online Flash application or as a video-on-demand stream for Windows Media Player.

This application should work on Windows. Optionally it can support other platforms, but it doesn t seem to be high priority.

Both GStreamer and DirectShow seem capable of providing the underlying technology. I have a little experience with GStreamer on Linux, and I like its design, so I m inclined to use it for this project. However, I don t know how well it is supported on Windows. I couldn t find any recent docs on how to build GStreamer on Windows. So I m afraid I ll get stuck somewhere in the process.

DirectShow seems like a safer option because it is much more widely used and there is much more documentation available for it on the internet.

Does anyone here have experience using GStreamer on Windows? Does it work well? Are there certain issues that I should be aware of?

Edit
I discovered the GStreamer OSSBuilds website and was able to quickly implement a simple video player (based on the playbin element) with it. So I think I ll pursue the GStreamer path a little further.

Answer 1

Ok, I ll answer this question myself. The simple answer is: GStreamer! I ve experienced no difficulties thus far. To make it work on Windows you need to use the GStreamer Winbuilds.

Update (6 months later)

Actually I burned myself a little bit on this bet. Later in the project the client specified that the WMV9 codec (VC-1) had to be supported. Since WMV9 encoders are only supported on Microsft platforms this wasn t possible to implement in a GStreamer-based solution. So maybe DirectShow would have been the right choice.

Answer 2

Last time I worked with GStreamer in windows was quite tedious.

If you take this way, you should be willing to spend a lot of time dealing with runtimes hell and other compilation issues. First thing you need to evaluate is which compiler/runtime you will use.

If portability is not a must, I whould take the easy way. DirectShow.

Answer 3

Consider looking at VLC. http://www.videolan.org/ I second what fnieto said about compilation hell with GStreamer on Winbdows (done it recently). But if you familiar with unix environment that might be not big trouble with Cygwin ot MSYS. But take in account that you probably will not get readily available and reliable hardware support with GStreamer on Windows as you might get with Media Foundation or DirectShow. Microsoft Media Center iTV framework worth looking at too.

Answer 4

avisynth might provide for easy mixing of streams, and can take directshow input.

Update (6 months later)

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