According to the source I found here (http://cgit.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gst-plugins-bad/tree/sys/dshowsrcwrapper/gstdshowvideosrc.c?h=BRANCH-RELEASE-0_10_19), the device property is not probable. I have also confirmed this in usage. I discovered this because I was writing an application to allow the user to select the correct web cam and the device-name for all Microsoft products (i.e. a Microsoft web cam) are in Unicode, using characters 302 and 256 which are obviously not in the utf-8 character set. Glib handles this gracefully, by converting the unusable characters to their decimal representation and adding them  to the return string. However, afterwards you cannot use that string to set the device-name property if it contains unicode to utf-8 characters. 

So, I thought, ok, this is fine, I will just use the device-name property for displaying the reader friendly name and then use the device property to actually set the correct device. However, I can't even probe the device property to do that. Looking at the source, it appears that the function gst_dshowvideosrc_get_device_name_values (GstDshowVideoSrc * src) has all of the functionality neccesary to do this with relatively no effort. It simply also needs to grab the clsid of the device while enumerating the device to get the friendly-name. I do not mind editing this myself, but I don't know which branch to patch. 

Also, gst_dshowvideosrc_set_property (GObject * object, guint prop_id,
    const GValue * value, GParamSpec * pspec) needs to handle the incoming characters that have been converted from Unicode to Utf-8 so that the device-name property can be set for Microsoft cameras.