Post06: Playing a Video File with GStreamer in C++20 and Rust

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 12:28:10 +0300

In Post04, we played a video file with a single gst-launch-1.0 pipeline:

gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location=big_buck_bunny_720p_h264.mov ! decodebin ! videoconvert ! autovideosink

That one-liner works because gst-launch-1.0 links decodebin’s output for us as soon as it appears. Post05 covered exactly what that output is: a Sometimes pad, created at runtime once decodebin has identified what’s inside the container. Outside of gst-launch-1.0, nothing links a Sometimes pad automatically — the application has to do it.

Rust on Salt and Pepper

Post06: Playing a Video File with GStreamer in C++20 and Rust