[gst-devel] fractions

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

On Thu, 2004-07-15 at 19:28, Benjamin Otte wrote:
> Your whole reasoning

It is not mine, it is the one I assembled from talking to people and
reading docs.  I don't find any other project out there that still uses
floats or doubles, except for MPlayer, which because it uses doubles has
bugs causing it to be unable to edit files with mencoder.

>  breaks down the moment someone specifies pixel aspect
> ratio or framerate as a double.

It doesn't break down, it can be made to work.  If a codec project
choses doubles, then they get what they ask for.  Floats aren't even
rounded off the same way on Windows as on Linux, or on different
architectures.

I'm saying, since everyone uses fractions, we should do it as well so
we're a lot more correct than we are right now.  I've never claimed it's
the perfect solution, I'm claiming that it's a useful primitive to have,
especially since every other codec project has it.


>  Because at exactly that moment you'll have
> the conversion issue again.

Yes, and given that the project has chosen floats, there's nothing you
can do about it anymore.  They've already gone for the suboptimal
solution.  It doesn't mean we have to break all the formats that do the
right thing because one day you'll decide to write one that uses floats
to get your point across.

> So introducing a fraction type is not really a solution to the problem.
> It's just a bit simpler for the current stuff.

Sigh.  It's not "simpler".  It's the correct solution for all media
types we currently handle.  It avoids the problems other projects have
made already.  And it'll be a hell of a lot easier to fix the codec
project that does the wrong thing.

> And please don't commit such huge changes directly before a freeze.

I've proposed the patch a few days ago, and stuff has gone in that seems
more invasive to me.  When I don't post changes for discussion first
people complain that I should propose them.  When I do propose them I
just get bogged down in endless discussions making me think I should
have commited two days ago.

There's no point in *saying* that stuff needs to be discussed.  We need
to act in such a way that it makes sense to discuss it and stimulates
people to propose stuff.

If the patch doesn't go in I expect someone else to at least give me
working aspect ratio handling in GStreamer that's as good as what I have
right now.  But I'll leave the final decision up to Dave...

sigh

Thomas

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