[gst-devel] Streaming only text

[Benjamin Otte]

On Fri, 2 May 2003, Magnus Bergman wrote:

> I am in need of a plug-in-based framework for streaming only text. I have the intention of writing every plug-in myself, if needed. Is there any major reason why gstreamer may not be suitable for this kind of application? Some potential reasons I could think of:
>
Great that someone finally uses it for something else. From the top of my
head GStreamer is capable of streaming everything, but could suffer from
problems when someone has not thought about something.

> 1) I suppose gstreamer is optimized for streaming a few large files. How will if perform with a lot of small files (let's say a few thousand 4k text files)?
>
GStreamer's core is not what people call optimized in any direction
because most time is spent inside the plugins and they are optimized.
Example: If you decode an mp3, 80% or more of the time required is spent
in the mp3 decoding plugin.

> 2) I understand that streaming audio and video requires timing. But how about just stream as fast as possible (which has to be useful for media conversion too)?
>
Timing is something a plugin can request. Most of the plugins have no
interest in timing. Only start-/endpoint plugins synchronize and only
some of them. A file reading plugin for example doesn't care, and recoding
mp3 -> ogg works as fast as possible without any timing going on.
So it is no problem at all.

> 3) In some cases it would be useful (for me) to use other char-sets than UTF-8 (it would be a waste of time to convert to UTF-8 and then back again). I read something about gstreamer only supporting UTF-8. The question is, can text buffers have a field telling about the encoding?
>
Plugins process data given to them inside GstBuffers. The type of data
that is sent is negotiated between the different plugins via caps (short
for capabilities). If you were to write all plugins yourself it should be
no problem to define capabilities yourself and attach a charset property
to it.
I don't know where the idea comes from that we would be bound to UTF-8
only.

What interests me now is: What do you need this framework for? What do you
want to do with it?

Cheers,
Benjamin