[gst-devel] some ideas for a gnome love shot

[Bastien Nocera]

Hey Ronald,

On Sat, 2004-04-24 at 23:11, Ronald S. Bultje wrote:
> Hey dudes,
> 
> I recently talked to Jeff and some others regarding our lack of
> acceptance in the playback part of GNOME so far (as opposed to Xine).
> Take Totem; pretty much anyone uses the Xine backend, and that's mostly
> because it's simply better than then GStreamer backend.

Good stuff.

<snip>
> * I hear some people tell that libgstplay/spider will crash or refuse to
> play back a file alltogether as soon as a substream is not recognized
> (e.g. audio in an AVI). This is not good, it should just ignore the
> stream and optionally display a message to the user. It should play back
> the rest.

Hmm, I think that showing a message, or even erroring when only an audio
stream isn't available is a bad idea. Don't go put policy in the
framework, we'd really need a way to the backend to check whether or not
the audio and/or video is supported, and whether audio and/or video is
present.

The current version of Totem-xine only errors if the video can't be
played for a video file, and if the audio is unsupported for an
audio-only file.

> * We probably want to do some internal testing of libgstplay/spider
> first so we actually know that the default use cases of an app such as
> Totem are pretty much crash-free. This includes loading a /dev/random
> file, clicking a random sequence of buttons and those things.

Even better is keeping a list of known crasher/problematic streams, and
regression test those. Launch Totem with a playlist of streams during
the night, and watch the crashes/hangs back in the morning.

<snip>

I'm happy to see there is work being done on getting the GStreamer
backend better. I must tell you that the xine backend still isn't fully
finished (as seen in the error handling changes recently, the bug fixes,
etc.), and there are a lot more things to be done to support multiple
backends easily (like being able to tell whether or not such and such
backend supports a particular feature).

Cheers

---
Bastien Nocera <hadess at hadess.net> 
The dandelion swayed in the gentle breeze like an oscillating electric
fan set on medium.