Building newer GStreamer versions

Application Development
1

I’d like to use the newest version of GStreamer and pipewire while developing but I cannot figure out how to build and install it properly while retaining functionality. I’m relying on pipewiresrc which always seems to be missing when I build.

git clone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gstreamer
cd gstreamer
meson setup builddir -Dtests=disabled-Dintrospection=disabled
meson compile -C builddir

I can then run ./gst-env.pyto get into an environment that uses it but

gst-inspect-1.0 pipewiresrc
No such element or plugin ‘pipewiresrc’

Which of course works fine with my system install

gst-inspect-1.0 pipewiresrc
Factory Details:
  Rank                     primary + 1 (257)
  Long-name                PipeWire source
  Klass                    Source/Audio/Video
  Description              Uses PipeWire to create audio/video
  Author                   Wim Taymans <wim.taymans@gmail.com>

Plugin Details:
  Name                     pipewire
  Description              Uses PipeWire to handle media streams
  Filename                 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gstreamer-1.0/libgstpipewire.so
  Version                  1.0.7


Filename                 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gstreamer-1.0/libgstpipewire.so

How exactly do I make it use a newer pipewire?

2

The pipewire plugin ships with pipewire and is not included in the GStreamer monorepo checkout.

If you’re using the dev environment, you could just copy the libgstpipewire.so file into path/to/gstreamer/prefix/lib/gstreamer-1.0 where path/to/gstreamer is the location of your monorepo checkout. You may have to mkdir -p prefix/lib/gstreamer-1.0 first. If you’re lucky that works.

3

I built pipewire and found this .so file that I need to copy. So I ran

sudo meson install -C builddir

Which should make a prefix in the default location of /usr/local and I can see inside /usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu a folder called gstreamer-1.0 that the plugin could go inside.

My problem now is whenever I try to do something with this new gstreamer I get

Terminal:~$ gst-inspect-1.0 --version
gst-inspect-1.0: symbol lookup error: gst-inspect-1.0: undefined symbol: _gst_value_unique_list_type

Terminal:~$ which gst-inspect-1.0
/usr/local/bin/gst-inspect-1.0

So clearly I’m still missing something. I don’t see anything obvious in GStreamer / gstreamer · GitLab that explains what else I need.

4

Before you were talking about an uninstalled dev env checkout, now you install things into a prefix, those are different things.

Because you installed into /usr/local there’s probably a mismatch/clash with your system packages now, things are picked up from different versions.

_gst_value_unique_list_type is something that only exists in the very latest GStreamer version from the main branch, so something you built might be pulling in an older libgstremaer-1.0.so from somewhere (probably your system prefix).

5

I had to add a few .bashrc entries to force it to use the new version.

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export GST_PLUGIN_PATH=/usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gstreamer-1.0
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

I built the newest pipewire and used the new libgstpipewire.so it generated but that didn’t work. I ended up copying my system libgstpipewire.so instead which looks to have picked up the newer of pipewire I installed.