Search code examples
gstreamerpipeline

What's the meaning of 'pay' 'depay' in gstreamer world?

I know some concepts in gstreamer like source, sink, pipeline, and pads.

Those are programming concepts and also literal English words, their meanings are related.

But I don't know the meaning of pay or depay like rtph264depay.

From some gst_parse_launch sample commands, it seems that rtph264depay is to receive the data of source.

So how to understand the word of depay? Pay as in pay some money so depay is like receive money?

Solution

  • It is actually written in the category they are in:

    $ gst-inspect-1.0 rtph264depay | grep Klass
  Klass                    Codec/Depayloader/Network/RTP

    So it is short for Payloader and Depayloader. Similar to an Muxer and Demuxer or Encoder and Decoder but nothing here is really encoded/decoded or muxed/demuxed. Just existing data is packaged in a specific format. Sometimes I have seen people calling that Packetizer and Depacketizer as well.