[gst-devel] cdparanoia vs. cdio/cddasrc - which one should go into gst-plugins-base?

[Tim Müller]

Hi gang,

in 0.8 we have two similar plugins that extract raw audio data from
audio CDs, namely the libcdparanoia-based cdparanoia plugin and the
libcdio-based cddasrc plugin. 

Both will eventually be ported to 0.9, the question now is which one
should go into gst-plugins-base and which one should go into
gst-plugins-good.


Some random comments from my side:

 * At the moment (in 0.8) both plugins are slightly different in their
interface and in their functionality. cddasrc does currently not try to
verify extracted audio data in the same way as cdparanoia does. This is
of course something that can be changed.

 * libcdparanoia [0] is well-tested, widely ported and does a great job
at ripping audio data, there is no question about that. It is also,
however, unmaintained (at least as far as I know). The last official
release was years ago, so it's close to impossible to get things fixed
upstream at the moment. And there are some things that we need to get
fixed in libcdparanoia that affect GStreamer applications [1].

* libcdio [2] does the same thing as cdparanoia, and a bit more. It's
actively maintained and has been ported to most unix platforms. Recent
versions of libcdio even provide a cdparanoia compatibility module that
is at least API compatible with cdparanoia, so it should even be
possible to relink our cdparanoia code against libcdio_paranoia without
any additional work.


Thus my suggestion is to put the cdio plugin in -base and cdparanoia in
-good, simply because the latter is unmaintained upstream and we can't
do anything about problems we're having with it.


So, which one should go into -base? 

 Cheers
  -Tim


[0] http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/
[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94289
[2] http://www.gnu.org/software/libcdio/