| Value | Meaning |
|---|---|
| NONE0 | No debugging level specified or desired. Used to deactivate debugging output. |
| ERROR1 | Error messages are to be used only when an error occurred that stops the application from keeping working correctly. An examples is gst_element_error, which outputs a message with this priority. It does not mean that the application is terminating as with g_error. |
| WARNING2 | Warning messages are to inform about abnormal behaviour that could lead to problems or weird behaviour later on. An example of this would be clocking issues ("your computer is pretty slow") or broken input data ("Can't synchronize to stream.") |
| FIXME3 | Fixme messages are messages that indicate that something in the executed code path is not fully implemented or handled yet. Note that this does not replace proper error handling in any way, the purpose of this message is to make it easier to spot incomplete/unfinished pieces of code when reading the debug log. |
| INFO4 | Informational messages should be used to keep the developer updated about what is happening. Examples where this should be used are when a typefind function has successfully determined the type of the stream or when an mp3 plugin detects the format to be used. ("This file has mono sound.") |
| DEBUG5 | Debugging messages should be used when something common happens that is not the expected default behavior, or something that's useful to know but doesn't happen all the time (ie. per loop iteration or buffer processed or event handled). An example would be notifications about state changes or receiving/sending of events. |
| LOG6 | Log messages are messages that are very common but might be useful to know. As a rule of thumb a pipeline that is running as expected should never output anything else but LOG messages whilst processing data. Use this log level to log recurring information in chain functions and loop functions, for example. |
| TRACE7 | Tracing-related messages. Examples for this are referencing/dereferencing of objects. |
| MEMDUMP9 | memory dump messages are used to log (small) chunks of data as memory dumps in the log. They will be displayed as hexdump with ASCII characters. |
| COUNT10 | The number of defined debugging levels. |
The level defines the importance of a debugging message. The more important a message is, the greater the probability that the debugging system outputs it.