[gst-devel] What projects are underway?

[Dan Dennedy]

I just subscribed to this list, so this reply is not properly threaded....

First of all, I want to comment on the post from 3ivx.com. Please consider
using the Quicktime 4 Linux implementation from
http://www.heroinewarrior.com/quicktime.php3 for your quicktime parsers.
The reason is because this is already a fairly mature implementation. More
specific reasons will become clear below.

Now, on to my projects. I am a member of the Linux1394 team (aka Firewire)
and related projects Kino and Coriander all hosted at SourceForge. Kino is
a gnome, cuts-only DV editor that I have contributed substantially to in
the areas of tape transport control, display video output, DV export over
1394, and related UI stuff. Currently, it stores DV encoded video captured
via 1394 in AVI (type1 and type2) files as a vids.dvsd stream plus audio.
FYI, Kino extensively uses libdv--the other project Omega Hacker has worked
on in conjunction with OTI.

Many users wish more stable DV/1394 capture from within Broadcast 2000 as
well as the other goodies that Kino has like tape transport control and DV
export over 1394. Stil other users simply want conversions between AVI and
Quicktime DV files. I have different goals than the direction for Broadcast
so I have not contributed to that project, but I would like
interoperability with it as well as the ability to encode the video as
various MPEG. Also, in Kino, we do not playback audio or allow direct
editing of it. However, we maintain the audio associated with each frame.
So, I did some research before reinventing the wheel and decided upon
gstreamer as the way to go forward a couple of months ago.

Coriander is a gnome app for working with uncompressed 1394 video cameras.
I just completed adding multi-threaded video-in-a-window (with Xv) and
still frame capture to it. I would like to also support these cameras for
video capture and editing. 

Therefore, my future projects inlude, in order:
1. /dev/dcvideo1394, a video4linux(2)-compliant driver for uncompressed
cameras
2. /dev/dv1394, a video4linux(2)-compliant driver for DV cameras
3. libavc, a library for device control over 1394 (including tape
transport).
4. AVI vids.dvsd codecs for gstreamer based upon dvgrab/Kino and libdv.
5. Quicktime codecs for gstreamer based upon Quicktime For Linux from Adam
Williams (http://www.heroinewarrior.com/), which supports several
compressions including DV.
6. Port Kino to gstreamer if a gstreamer editor does not already exist that
I like.
7. Develop a cross-platform, open-source SMIL player based upon Gecko and
native platform multimedia architectures (gstreamer for Linux/BSD,
Quicktime for Mac, DirectShow for Windows).

My goal is to be done with 1, 2, & 3 by the end of Q3--I'm trying to be
practical, but I have quite a bit of experience with all the underlying
technologies. I would love it if someone beats me to numbers 4 and 5.
Obviously, #7 is like the Holy Grail, but my intention is that project #6
uses a subset of SMIL for a project file/EDL.