Using a Redistributable macOS GStreamer

If you want to re-distribute GStreamer with your gstreamer-java application, it's fairly simply on Windows. You just include the GStreamer distribution in your application's layout and set PATH from your app before calling Gst.init(). On macOS, life is not so easy. Here's the magic you need to make it work.

Creating a redistributable GStreamer for MacOS

Install the version of GStreamer you want to use. The macOS installer will install it here:

/Library/Frameworks/GStreamer.framework

Make a copy of the installation

$ sudo cp -R /Library/Frameworks/GStreamer.framework/Versions/1.0 ~/mygst

Change ownership of the layout

$ sudo chown -R jdoe ~/mygst    # where jdoe is your user ID

Check to see if you need to use osxrelocator to adjust the library references in GStreamer's executables. Run:

$ otool -L ~/mygst/libexec/gstreamer-1.0/gst-plugin-scanner

The output will show which dynamic libraries (*.dylib) the scanner program uses. If you see absolute paths there (/Library/Frameworks/GStreamer.framework/…), then you need to do this adjustment. As of GStreamer 1.16. that is the case. A future release may not.

If you need to adjust, do the following:

$ git clone https://github.com/tito/osxrelocator.git ~/osxrelocator
$ python ~/osxrelocator/osxrelocator/__init__.py -r ~/mygst/libexec/gstreamer-1.0 /Library/Frameworks/GStreamer.framework/Versions/1.0/lib @executable_path/../../lib

Using the redistributable GStreamer from a gstreamer-java app

In the gstreamer-java application, before calling Gst.init() on macOS, you'll need to do a few things.

Set property jna.library.path to ~/mygst/lib

Set two environment variables: (use gstreamer-java's GLib class after setting the property above)

GST_PLUGIN_PATH_1_0=~/mygst/lib/gstreamer-1.0
GST_PLUGIN_SCANNER_1_0=~/mygst/libexec/gstreamer-1.0/gst-plugin-scanner

Obviously, GStreamer in the field is not going to be at ~/mygst. You're going to package what you created at ~/mygst into your application's layout. So the paths you set in the property and environment variables will be dynamically generated based on where the application is running from.