[gst-devel] colorspace conversion

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

On Tue, 2004-02-17 at 21:05, Ronald Bultje wrote:
> Hi Thomas,
> 
> On Tue, 17 Feb 2004, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
> > I agree with all your points.  You are still, however, missing one -
> > ffmpeg cannot be distributed by either GNOME (in source form) or by any
> > distribution (in binary form).  We need our player to work, however few
> > the formats it handles, from a distribution.
> 
> Hm... OK, you've got a point. I'd say that the same goes for
> other parts of GStreamer or even GStreamer as whole, btw (mpeg2dec, divx,
> some more), but anyway.

IANAL, but I have the feeling there still is a difference between "glue
code that is supposed to link against a questionable library" and "glue
code plust that questionable library".

> Source is fine. Read MPEG LA's license. Read patent licenses. It's really
> a lame excuse; but source-only is a nice clause that we and GNOME can
> abuse to distribute ffmpeg and more stuff in source form.

GNOME disagrees, so there's no point in discussing that route.

> (In case your lawyer or anyone from the US government asks: I didn't say
> that.)

Which is the whole problem - if you cannot stick to your story, it shows
you don't believe your own story either.  That's fine, but it
invalidates the point you're trying to make.

> That leaves distributions that want binaries. I'd say they can strip
> ffmpeg just as they strip GStreamer (hey, ffmpeg even has compile-time
> options for that!) and be fine with it. 

Yeah, but as a release maintainer I don't like non-pristine sources
being shipped.

> I'm sure RedHat or Sun lawyers
> will disagree, but that's not our problem. What I've said above is
> accurate and right, I'll just never defend it in front of a court, but
> that's merely because (here it goes ;) ) I'm not a lawyer.

Again - you're right, but you invalidate your own point.

There are three problems I wanted to solve by moving ffmpeg out of the
plugins;
a - make sure GNOME can distribute gst-plugins
b - make sure we can fix the problems we keep getting, as well as the
bug reports, on the very dodgy cvs slurp setup I made but I no longer
want to maintain from inside gst-plugins due to the amazingly slow
autobuild.
c - make sure that, for whatever reason gst-plugins doesn't build, it's
not our wonkey cvs slurp setup.  90 % of the people dropping into the
channel unable to build gst-plugins were unable to because of ffmpeg. 
Does it help them to say "Ronald can build it just fine, why can't you
?"

Also, and this is important - we should leverage our advantages over
other media frameworks.  GStreamer was explicitly designed to serve as
the free glue to proprietary/questionable codec code.  This means, the a
whole stack of completely free code can serve as a trojan horse for our
project to be the one selected by all distributions as a base platform,
because it can offer a full solution using free codecs like vorbis and
theora to have a multimedia playback/streaming solution.  We would be
crazy not to use that advantage.

I don't know if you've noticed, but lots of users demand their
distributions to come up with multimedia solutions, and lots of
distributions are trying to fill that hole (see which people are being
hired/assigned to it recently), and we would be stupid not to present us
from our best side and exploit the advantages we have over the, also
obvious, disadvantage that we're just not as mature yet.

I'm pretty sure we'll have this talk again next year :) Let's hope any
major distro by then has a GStreamer-based player and recorder and
streamer, as well as free audio and video codecs.
 
Thomas


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