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Minitheater, small media player on GStreamer

Minitheater is a small prof-of-concept multimedia player for Unix and Unix-like OS.

It's built around the GStreamer multimedia framework, one of the best pieces of software I've ever seen. GStreamer is a powerful toolkit. Every logical function in decoding and encoding multimedia is done by a module or a plugin. There are file source modules, demuxer modules, decoder modules, video and audio output modules, and the opposite too (video and audio sources, encoders and muxers). And if that's not enough, it has also text overlay modules (for subtitles), network sources (to play network streams), Gnome integration modules (Gnome VFS and Gnome video and audio preferred sources and destinations).

I've started writing Minitheater to learn GStreamer. A customer asked for an audio/video application to acquire from a Huppage card to record live lessons. After a brief lookup over libmpeg2, which made me gasping, I've discovered GStreamer, and everything turned into a funny Lego playing afternoon ;-)

Minitheater is not a perfect software and will not be improved unless I'll be in the mood of doing that. So why I'm releasing it? For the very same reason I've written it: learning attitude. Minitheater is a small multimedia player, without the complexity of real applications like Totem (which is also based on GStreamer). So learning from the source is much more easy.

I hope you'll find it an interesting reading.

Minitheater is free software released under the GPL.