[gst-devel] GStreamer news, 24 November
Andy Wingo
wingo at pobox.com
Thu Nov 24 06:44:07 CET 2005
Fala hackers,
E ai? GStreamer rages on, stealing our days and nights. One release
down, one to go, and then the oh ten oh. Catch the audiotestsrc sound
while we break the week down yo.
Kicking Ass And Taking Names
----------------------------
The amount of hacking done in the last 10 days on GStreamer has been
astounding. If concentrated and properly channeled, it could power the
island nation of Australia for 3 full weeks. Intense is the word.
Interesting Additions
---------------------
Jan Schmidt is not only a hacker's hacker, but he works hard too. Many
people have thought that framerate in GStreamer should be expressed as a
fraction, but only Jan actually took the time to sit down, add the
needed core functionality, *and* change all of the plugins (with some
help from Mike Smith).
API-wise, the core now supports fraction ranges
('framerate=(fraction)[2/3, 17/4]'), including range intersections and
unions, as well as some new convenience functions for dealing with
fractions in caps and structures.
Another longstanding wishlist item was finally completed last week as we
implemented a framework for synchronizing multiple clocks. Whenever you
capture from or output to multiple devices, there are different clocks
at work -- one provided by each hardware device, and possibly a
different one for the pipeline as a whole.
In this situation, to ensure that buffer timestamps are relative to the
same clock, one clock (the _master_) needs to provide the definitive
time, and the other ones (the _slaves_) try to match their time to the
master. This enables the possibility of synchronized capture from
multiple sound cards, among other things.
Interestingly enough the same framework can be used to syncronize clocks
over the network. A GstClock running on one machine can now export its
time over the network [0], allowing specialized GstNetClientClock [2]
instances on other machines to slave their clocks it. Most excellent.
These network clocking components are part of a new GStreamer core
package, found in the gst/net directory of GStreamer core, called
gstreamer-net. This package has its own library, its own headers, and
its own pkg-config information, so that you can link it in to your
application only if you need it.
[0] http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/doc/gstreamer/head/gstreamer/html/GstNetTimeProvider.html
[1] http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/doc/gstreamer/head/gstreamer/html/GstNetClientClock.html
API Freeze Breakage
-------------------
As everyone is I'm sure aware, our schedule [2] specified that API
changes filed in bugzilla were to be applied for our latest release,
0.9.6. Work started on merging in these changes on Saturday, but did not
finish until Wednesday, almost 900 lines of ChangeLog later. Most of the
changes can be seen on the bugs that blocked #319388 [3].
Application authors will note that framerates for video are now
fractions; thus any caps filters should be updated. Note that integers
also parse as fractions, so 'framerate=(fraction)25' should work.
Also be aware that the tag setter interfaces changed so that the verb
stem of the function name is more descriptive, e.g. gst_tag_setter_merge
changed to gst_tag_setter_merge_tags. There is a script to automate
these updates, run as:
$ find myprojdir -name '*.[ch]' -exec gstreamer/scripts/update-funcnames {}\;
Plugin developers will find the update-macros script in the same
directory useful for automatically renaming some macros that changed.
gst_caps_structure_fixate_* was renamed to gst_structure_fixate_*, and
value arrays should now only be accessed via the gst_value_array API and
not the gst_value_list API.
Plugin authors should also note that it is no longer necessary to take
the stream lock in event functions; any instances of GST_STREAM_LOCK or
GST_STREAM_UNLOCK should probably be removed unless they are part of a
source pad's seek implementation. Ask on the channel if you need more
help.
Finally, the '0.9' major-minor number will change to '0.10' starting
with the next GStreamer release. Anyone who makes applications or
plugins with GStreamer should look at the migration mail [4].
[2] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.gstreamer.devel/14038
[3] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=319388
[4] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.gstreamer.devel/14251
Tick Tick Tick
--------------
There are 11 days left until the stable release of GStreamer 0.10.0.
Woot! Note that we're pushing the 0.9.7 release forward by one day.
29 November: 0.9.7 (the 0.10.0 prereleaseA)
05 December: 0.10.0
Plums In The Icebox
-------------------
Aside from the stable-cleaning involved in updating the plugins for the
API renames and fractional framerates, we did manage to hack in some
more substantial changes.
Authors of video players will be interested in these notes on the XOverlay
interface by Julien Moutte:
XOverlay now only focuses on providing a way to set your own window
on or get the generated window from the video sink element. It also
provides a way to force the video sink to expose the latest frame to
handle expose events while being PAUSED. The desired-size features
are gone because you are supposed to get that in another way.
Thanks, Julien.
base: audioclock supports master/slave operation, sinesrc removed in
favor of audiotestsrc, xoverlay interface changes, xvimagesink
handles aspect ratio/navigation/expose in PAUSED, vorbisenc
bugfixes, ximagesink doesn't flicker any more and can keep
aspect ratio, updates for the new segment helper API, lots of
pad template leaks fixed, baseaudiosink bugfixes,
oggmux/vorbisenc leaks plugged
good: Julien "video hero" Moutte ported videofilter ported to use
basetransform and updated the effectv, videoflip, and
navigationtest plugins, goom got a bugfix, cutter ported,
dv1394src and udpsrc now properly handle URIs, wavenc fixes,
speex rtp elements added, avidemux bugfixes.
bad: initial port of musepackdec, tremor vorbis decoder can operate
in streaming mode
ugly: Better seeking in mad, mpeg2dec modernization, mpegstream plugin
ported by Joser Zlomek.
Digits
------
Core files changed since the last summary : 174
Lines added since the last summary : 8236
Lines removed : 3214
Net change in core value according to sloccount(1) : +$148,554.69 AUD
Total number of GStreamer bugs as of today : 206
Number opened in the last week : 32
Number closed in the last week : 68
Net change : -36
Rank among most buggy projects hosted in gnome bugzilla : 10
Fully 4 of top 15 bug closers are hacking GStreamer -- wingo, __tim,
msmith, and bilboed. With 68 bugs closed this week [5], we are really
starting to take a bite out of Bugzilla. Let's keep it up!
[5] http://tinyurl.com/8v3rw
Current Releases
----------------
0.9.6 of all of the development modules was released yesterday, the
24th. Barring emergencies, the API and ABI is now frozen.
Latest development versions:
gstreamer: 0.9.6
gst-plugins-base: 0.9.6
gst-plugins-good: 0.9.6
gst-plugins-ugly: 0.9.6
gst-plugins-bad: 0.9.6
gst-ffmpeg: 0.9.6
gst-python: 0.9.6
Latest stable versions:
gstreamer: 0.8.11
gst-plugins: 0.8.11
gst-ffmpeg: 0.8.7
gst-python: 0.8.2
Featured Application: Muine
---------------------------
Christian Vander Schaller comes down from the mountain, bringing us
these tablets of truth.
This week we spotlight the Muine Music player created by Jorn
Baayen. Muine is a Music player written in C#. Its tries to take a
different approach with its user interface than iTunes or WinAmp,
unlike most other players out today. The organization is organized
around albums and is kept small and efficient. Thanks to the work of
Iain Holmes there is even a patch porting Muine to GStreamer
0.9/0.10 available [6]. Check out Muine at:
http://muine.gooeylinux.org/
[6] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/muine-list/2005-November/msg00016.html
Iain notes this patch is preliminary and might molest the pooch.
These days with 0.10 on the way it's time to stop hacking libraries and
start making applications people love to use. Take your old ideas down
from the shelf, dust them off with something new, and let's make 2006
the year of GStreamer sound and video.
Peace out,
--
Andy Wingo
http://wingolog.org/
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