This makes running tests harder as we cannot call gst_init() after gst_deinit() has been called. This is what the API reference has to say about it at https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/gstreamer/gst.html?gi-language=c#gst_deinit It is normally not needed to call this function in a normal application as the resources will automatically be freed when the program terminates. This function is therefore mostly used by testsuites and other memory profiling tools.