Zeenix posted his ideas a few days agao. Here are mine. The idea is to have a proxy element for remote elements so that you can treat the whole pipeline as a local one. The proxy element creates the real instance by talking to GOD (GStreamer Object Daemon, GObject Daemon, ...) on the respective machine.

At runtime when the proxy-element receives data it sends it to the remote element and after processing it gets it back and forwards it to the element. The challenge is to optimize links when multiple conected elements are on the same remote machine so that the data gets passed directly there.

proxy creation

In addition to

GstElement* gst_element_factory_make (const gchar *factoryname, const gchar *name);

we need:

GstElement* gst_element_factory_make_remote (const gchar *factoryname, const gchar *name, GstRemoteFactory *remote);

and some API to get a remote factory handle via hostname lookup, ip address lookup or even zeroconf (avahi).

So how does this sounds like. Anything in here that definitely wont work?