Building GStreamer on UNIX

On UNIX, GStreamer uses the standard GNU build system, using autoconf for package configuration and resolving portability issues, automake for building makefiles that comply with the GNU Coding Standards, and libtool for building shared libraries on multiple platforms. The normal sequence for compiling and installing the GStreamer library is thus:

The standard options provided by GNU autoconf may be passed to the configure script. Please see the autoconf documentation or run ./configure --help for information about the standard options.

In addition there are several options to activate or deactivate features. E.g. passing --disable-gst-debug to configure will turn the debugging subsystem into a non-functional stub and remove all macro based invocations from within the library (and anything compiled against the library afterwards.)

If library size matters and one builds in a controlled environment, it is also possible to totally remove subsystem code. This is intentionally not offered as a configure option as it causes an ABI break. Code built against a version of GStreamer without these modifications needs to be recompiled.

Building GStreamer Applications

Applications and libraries can use pkg-config to get all the needed compiler and linker flags to build against GStreamer. Please note that GStreamer is split into several libraries itself. pkg-config --list-all | grep gstreamer will list the available libraries.