# Buffers and Events

The data flowing through a pipeline consists of a combination of buffers and events. Buffers contain the actual media data. Events contain control information, such as seeking information and end-of-stream notifiers. All this will flow through the pipeline automatically when it's running. This chapter is mostly meant to explain the concept to you; you don't need to do anything for this.

## Buffers

Buffers contain the data that will flow through the pipeline you have created. A source element will typically create a new buffer and pass it through a pad to the next element in the chain. When using the GStreamer infrastructure to create a media pipeline you will not have to deal with buffers yourself; the elements will do that for you.

A buffer consists, amongst others, of:

- Pointers to memory objects. Memory objects encapsulate a region in the memory.

- A timestamp for the buffer.

- A refcount that indicates how many elements are using this buffer. This refcount will be used to destroy the buffer when no element has a reference to it.

- Buffer flags.

The simple case is that a buffer is created, memory allocated, data put in it, and passed to the next element. That element reads the data, does something (like creating a new buffer and decoding into it), and unreferences the buffer. This causes the data to be free'ed and the buffer to be destroyed. A typical video or audio decoder works like this.

There are more complex scenarios, though. Elements can modify buffers in-place, i.e. without allocating a new one. Elements can also write to hardware memory (such as from video-capture sources) or memory allocated from the X-server (using XShm). Buffers can be read-only, and so on.

## Events

Events are control particles that are sent both up- and downstream in a pipeline along with buffers. Downstream events notify fellow elements of stream states. Possible events include seeking, flushes, end-of-stream notifications and so on. Upstream events are used both in application-element interaction as well as element-element interaction to request changes in stream state, such as seeks. For applications, only upstream events are important. Downstream events are just explained to get a more complete picture of the data concept.

Since most applications seek in time units, our example below does so too:

    static void
    seek_to_time (GstElement *element,
    	      guint64     time_ns)
    {
      GstEvent *event;

      event = gst_event_new_seek (1.0, GST_FORMAT_TIME,
    			      GST_SEEK_FLAG_NONE,
    			      GST_SEEK_METHOD_SET, time_ns,
    			      GST_SEEK_TYPE_NONE, G_GUINT64_CONSTANT (0));
      gst_element_send_event (element, event);
    }

The function `gst_element_seek ()` is a shortcut for this. This is mostly just to show how it all works.