Chapter 7. Bus

A bus is a simple system that takes care of forwarding messages from the pipeline threads to an application in its own thread context. The advantage of a bus is that an application does not need to be thread-aware in order to use GStreamer, even though GStreamer itself is heavily threaded.

Every pipeline contains a bus by default, so applications do not need to create a bus or anything. The only thing applications should do is set a message handler on a bus, which is similar to a signal handler to an object. When the mainloop is running, the bus will periodically be checked for new messages, and the callback will be called when any message is available.

7.1. How to use a bus

There are two different ways to use a bus:


#include <gst/gst.h>

static GMainLoop *loop;

static gboolean
my_bus_callback (GstBus     *bus,
		 GstMessage *message,
		 gpointer    data)
{
  switch (GST_MESSAGE_TYPE (message)) {
    case GST_MESSAGE_ERROR: {
      GError *err;
      gchar *debug;

      gst_message_parse_error (message, &err, &debug);
      g_print ("Error: %s\n", err->message);
      g_error_free (err);
      g_free (debug);

      g_main_loop_quit (loop);
      break;
    }
    case GST_MESSAGE_EOS:
      /* end-of-stream */
      g_main_loop_quit (loop);
      break;
    default:
      /* unhandled message */
      break;
  }

  /* remove message from the queue */
  return TRUE;
}

gint
main (gint   argc,
      gchar *argv[])
{
  GMainLoop *loop;
  GstElement *pipeline;
  GstBus *bus;

  /* init */
  gst_init (&argc, &argv);

  /* create pipeline, add handler */
  pipeline = gst_pipeline_new ("my_pipeline");
  bus = gst_pipeline_get_bus (GST_PIPELINE (pipeline));
  gst_bus_add_watch (bus, my_bus_callback, NULL);
  gst_object_unref (bus);

[..]

  /* in the mainloop, all messages posted to the bus by the pipeline
   * will automatically be sent to our callback. */
  loop = g_main_loop_new (NULL, FALSE);
  g_main_loop_run (loop);

  return 0;
}
    
    

It is important to know that the handler will be called in the thread context of the mainloop. This means that the interaction between the pipeline and application over the bus is asynchronous, and thus not suited for some real-time purposes, such as cross-fading between audio tracks, doing (theoretically) gapless playback or video effects. All such things should be done in the pipeline context, which is easiest by writing a GStreamer plug-in. It is very useful for its primary purpose, though: passing messages from pipeline to application. The advantage of this approach is that all the threading that GStreamer does internally is hidden from the application and the application developer does not have to worry about thread issues at all.

Note that if you're using the default GLib mainloop integration, you can, instead of attaching a watch, connect to the "message" signal on the bus. This way you don't have to switch() on all possible message types; just connect to the interesting signals in form of "message::<type>", where <type> is a specific message type (see the next section for an explanation of message types).

The above snippet could then also be written as:


GstBus *bus;

[..]

bus = gst_pipeline_get_bus (GST_PIPELINE (pipeline);
gst_bus_add_signal_watch (bus);
g_signal_connect (bus, "message::error", G_CALLBACK (cb_message_error), NULL);
g_signal_connect (bus, "message::eos", G_CALLBACK (cb_message_eos), NULL);

[..]
    

If you aren't using GLib mainloop, the message signals won't be available by default. You can however use a small helper exported by to provide integration with the mainloop you're using, and enable generation of bus signals (see documentation for details)