[gst-devel] handling playlists (was: SMIL: how to read while being paused?)

[Ákos Maróy]

I've found the issue below while developing a SMIL gstreamer element.
I've posted the question earlier to the list, but maybe that e-mail was
too long, and contained too many issues...

so here is the problem, but only one problem again:


one problem with handling SMIL playlists is that one has to read before
being in PLAYING. as I understand, as an element gets into PAUSED state,
it should have everything set up for playing.

but for SMIL, one has to read the playlist first to know what and how to
set up. I've implemented an element called the oneshotreader, that reads
everything on its source using a bytestream. this is how a playlist is
being read, and it is processed afterwards.

but, unfortunately one can't read into the bytestream before being set
to PLAY. thus, one can't actually set up the resources needed for
playing before being set to PLAY. (as a workaround I usually open for
playing beforehand, wait for the first sample to come out, and set back
to pause. but this is quite ugly.)

I wonder how one should get around this problem? and this is not
SMIL-related, basically all playlist formats would have the same issue,
the major difference being that these are just playlist that describe
what to play, and not the actual media bytestreams.