[gst-devel] How goes work on a asf/wmv plugin

[Ronald Bultje]

Hey.

On Sat, 2003-08-23 at 09:38, Louis Garcia wrote:
> The only thing holding me back from using gstreamer 100% is the lack on
> an asf.wmv decoder. Is this being worked on?

HEAD has a asf demuxer and wraps ffmpeg and its wmv/wma decoders. I'm
working on a ASF muxer. There are - as Christian already said - not in
0.6.x. The issue here isn't that the plugins aren't there, but it's
simply that nobody has worked on their connectivity. I'm pretty much
affraid that the wmv decoders and asf demuxer won't go together, simply
because nobody tested it and nobody worked on fixing this. FFMPEG really
needs a lot of details done before such things work, and I haven't
checked each individual ffmpeg codec yet.

> Also, Just wondering how hard is it to port plugins from xine/mplayer to
> gstreamer? Is it just lack of man power?

FFMPEG "has it all". A few hours ago, I said something like this on IRC:

"ffmpeg really isn't that perfect. Our version constantly crashes in
weird ways on several codecs (SVQ1, SVQ3, etc.). Xine/mplayer work
allright, but at least the xine version is heavily modified and not
backportable. I haven't looked at the mplayer version enough just yet.
What we need is someone that is dedicatedly working on such playback
issues, and we don't have that right now. This isn't a matter of
creating plugins, we have them; it's simply a matter of connectivity."

So yes, we don't have enough manpower for that. We advance, but such
things only progress slowly. :-(. And it's only finetuning that's
needed. However, nobody did that yet. And it's a pretty boring job.

Example is the SVQ1 decoder. I've had it working locally now, but it
requires several hacks to do so, since ffmpeg spits out YUV411P frames,
and xvideosink takes YUV422/YUV420P. It's really simple to get it
working, but it's a hell to find out. Checking each codec in this way is
going to go like this: check, fix small issues which take hours to find,
and advance to the next one...

Ronald

-- 
Ronald Bultje <rbultje at ronald.bitfreak.net>