[gst-devel] RE: [linux-audio-dev] LADMEA revisited (was: LAAGA and supporting programs)

Baker, Steve SBaker at CHELLO.com
Wed Oct 3 00:50:04 CEST 2001


> >I'm not sure I agree here - I think the GStreamer team has a 
> better grasp of
> >the real issues here than most. And by the way, why can't 
> Ardour be turned
> >into a GStreamer plugin? The GStreamer team would probably 
> appreciated the
> >changes required to make that happen.

With respect I don't think Ardour could be made a plugin of *anything* ;) .
But seriously, if something can be loaded as a shared lib and it has an API
that gives access to memory structures then an optimal GStreamer plugin can
be implemented.

As far as communicating between processes goes, there needs to be a defined
protocol and that is what JACK/LADMEA is all about.  GStreamer plugins could
be written for either of these IPC mechanisms with no tweaking of GStreamer
internals.

> I've talked with both the GStreamer people and also with someone
> involved in the prehistory of GStreamer. GStreamer doesn't have the
> same design goals as JACK. It had an even more different design goals
> when it started (mostly a way to buffer jitter in a media stream).
> The challenges of making it into an RT-friendly, audio h/w friendly
> framework that worked across application boundaries amount, in my
> mind, to a complete reimplementation (and perhaps more).

GStreamer is RT-friendly and audio h/w friendly. However its purpose is not
to allow multimedia applications to communicate with each other.

As for JACK vs LADMEA within GStreamer, I'm still sitting on the fence as to
which will be implemented first.  The obvious answer is which framework
reaches maturity first and how many other applications support that
framework.  Also there is no reason why plugins for other frameworks can't
be written later.

A JACK implementation provides a few challanges since its callback model
provides a buffer to populate with data so we need some way of making sure
the same buffer comes out of the other end of the pipeline.  I won't bore
you with the specifics but I can think of several ways around this issue.

To be honest I haven't grokked the LADMEA header enough to know how hard a
gstreamer implementation would be.

cheers




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