GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows.

It is designed to work on a variety of operating systems, e.g. the BSDs, OpenSolaris, Linux, Android, macOS, iOS, Windows, OS/400.

In addition to source code releases, the GStreamer project provides binary builds for Android, iOS, OSX and Windows.

Plug-in libraries get dynamically loaded to support a wide spectrum of codecs, container formats, input/output drivers and effects.

[10] Individual distributions may further sub-classify these plug-ins: for example Ubuntu groups the "bad" and "ugly" sets into the "Universe" or the "Multiverse" components.

In addition, there is a GStreamer FFmpeg plug-in (called gst-libav for historic reasons[14]) that extends the number of supported media formats.

Such needs to be supported by the device driver, which in turn provides one or multiple interfaces, like VDPAU, VAAPI, Distributed Codec Engine or DXVA to end-user software like MPlayer to access this hardware and offload computation to it.

The Good, Bad and Ugly GStreamer plugins mentioned earlier provide, alongside processing elements/filters of all kinds, support for a wide variety of file formats, protocols and multimedia codecs.

Towards the end of January 2001, they hired Erik Walthinsen to develop methods for embedding GStreamer in smaller (cell phone-class) devices.

Every series is not very popular in the Linux community mostly because of stability issues and a serious lack of features compared to competing projects like Xine, MPlayer, and VLC.

During this time, Fluendo hired most of the core developers including Wim Taymans and attracted the support of companies such as Nokia and Intel to bring GStreamer to a professional level and drive community adoption.

With a new stable core in place, GStreamer gained in popularity in 2006, being used by media players including Totem, Rhythmbox and Banshee with many more to follow.

Between June 2012 and August 2014, GStreamer 0.10 was also distributed by Collabora and Fluendo as a multiplatform SDK,[23] on the third-party gstreamer.com website (rather than gstreamer.freedesktop.org for the upstream community project).

The goal was to provide application developers with a SDK that would be functionally identical on Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, and Android.

The statement reasserted the GStreamer project's willingness to help application and plugin developers migrate to the new technology, and hinted that those for whom switching to the 1.x series was still considered impossible could seek assistance from various consulting companies.

Version 1.14 was released on March 19, 2018,[28] adding support for WebRTC, AV1, Nvidia NVDEC, and Secure Reliable Transport, among other changes.