See my post elsewhere here that begins: What if every source or sink had a MIME type? Extend the concept of GStreamer out to the shell, filesystem and command

See my post elsewhere here that begins: What if every source or sink had a MIME type? Extend the concept of GStreamer out to the shell, filesystem and command line tools. You could still process sound and video this way. Tools would indicate what type of data they emit, and other tools could check the incoming type of data to be sure it is something they can handle. (eg, you can't pipe a PNG file into a tool expecting JSON.)