A video pipeline consists of three elements:
- A live-capture/file-src element receives frames either from an external source, or produces video frames internally. The captured video frames are written to memory.
- A processing element reads video frames from memory, performs certain processing, and then writes the processed frames back to memory.
- A display element reads video frames from memory and sends the frames to a sink. In cases where the sink is displayed, this pipeline is also referred to as display pipeline.