All the tutorials work flawlessly on 64bit Windows 7, using Python 2.7.5 from http://python.org/, and 32bit GStreamer SDK 2013.6 from http://docs.gstreamer.com/display/GstSDK/Installing+on+Windows.
However, there are various problems when running on 32bit Linux Mint 15 (VirtualBox and standalone) and Mageia 3 (in VirtualBox)