Description Buffers are the basic unit of data transfer in GStreamer. The GstBuffer type provides all the state necessary to define a region of memory as part of a stream. Sub-buffers are also supported, allowing a smaller region of a buffer to become its own buffer, with mechanisms in place to ensure that neither memory space goes away prematurely. Buffers are usually created with gst_buffer_new(). After a buffer has been created one will typically allocate memory for it and set the size of the buffer data. The following example creates a buffer that can hold a given video frame with a given width, height and bits per plane. Alternatively, use gst_buffer_new_and_alloc() to create a buffer with preallocated data of a given size. The data pointed to by the buffer can be retrieved with the GST_BUFFER_DATA() macro. The size of the data can be found with GST_BUFFER_SIZE(). For buffers of size 0, the data pointer is undefined (usually NULL) and should never be used. If an element knows what pad you will push the buffer out on, it should use gst_pad_alloc_buffer() instead to create a buffer. This allows downstream elements to provide special buffers to write in, like hardware buffers. A buffer has a pointer to a GstCaps describing the media type of the data in the buffer. Attach caps to the buffer with gst_buffer_set_caps(); this is typically done before pushing out a buffer using gst_pad_push() so that the downstream element knows the type of the buffer. A buffer will usually have a timestamp, and a duration, but neither of these are guaranteed (they may be set to GST_CLOCK_TIME_NONE). Whenever a meaningful value can be given for these, they should be set. The timestamp and duration are measured in nanoseconds (they are GstClockTime values). A buffer can also have one or both of a start and an end offset. These are media-type specific. For video buffers, the start offset will generally be the frame number. For audio buffers, it will be the number of samples produced so far. For compressed data, it could be the byte offset in a source or destination file. Likewise, the end offset will be the offset of the end of the buffer. These can only be meaningfully interpreted if you know the media type of the buffer (the GstCaps set on it). Either or both can be set to GST_BUFFER_OFFSET_NONE. gst_buffer_ref() is used to increase the refcount of a buffer. This must be done when you want to keep a handle to the buffer after pushing it to the next element. To efficiently create a smaller buffer out of an existing one, you can use gst_buffer_create_sub(). If a plug-in wants to modify the buffer data in-place, it should first obtain a buffer that is safe to modify by using gst_buffer_make_writable(). This function is optimized so that a copy will only be made when it is necessary. A plugin that only wishes to modify the metadata of a buffer, such as the offset, timestamp or caps, should use gst_buffer_make_metadata_writable(), which will create a subbuffer of the original buffer to ensure the caller has sole ownership, and not copy the buffer data. Several flags of the buffer can be set and unset with the GST_BUFFER_FLAG_SET() and GST_BUFFER_FLAG_UNSET() macros. Use GST_BUFFER_FLAG_IS_SET() to test if a certain GstBufferFlag is set. Buffers can be efficiently merged into a larger buffer with gst_buffer_merge() and gst_buffer_span() if the gst_buffer_is_span_fast() function returns TRUE. An element should either unref the buffer or push it out on a src pad using gst_pad_push() (see GstPad). Buffers are usually freed by unreffing them with gst_buffer_unref(). When the refcount drops to 0, any data pointed to by GST_BUFFER_MALLOCDATA() will also be freed. Last reviewed on August 11th, 2006 (0.10.10)