The GStreamer multimedia framework and the accompanying GNonLin set of plugins for non-linear editing offer all the building blocks for:

* Decoding and encoding to a wide variety of formats, through all the available GStreamer plugins.

* Easily choosing segments of streams and arranging them through time through the GNonLin set of plugins.

But all those building blocks only offer stream-level access, which results in developers who want to write non-linear editors to write a consequent amount of code to get to the level of non-linear editing notions which are closer and more meaningful for the end-user (and therefore the application).

The GStreamer Editing Services (hereafter GES) aims to fill the gap between GStreamer/GNonLin and the application developer by offering a series of classes to simplify the creation of many kind of editing-related applications.