[gst-devel] GstBaseDecode class

[itoral at igalia.com]

Hi all,

I have been developing software on top of gstreamer for some time and now
I would like to get a bit more close to its internals. With that in mind I
started reading the plugin developer guide and implemented a few audio and
video transform plugins to play around with the main concepts.

Lately I've been looking for something that would let me learn more and at
the same time be helpful to the project, and I found a page with some
tasks here:

http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/wiki/TaskList

I think writing base classes would let me achieve both targets, on one
hand, one has to read an understand how other plugins of a certain type
work in order to create a base class for them, and on the other hand,
having base classes would be obviously useful.

Even though I have no experience whatsoever writing source/sink/codec
plugins, I would like to propose myself to work on this. Actually, out of
curiosity, I started looking at the code of the mpeg2, ac3 and mad
decoders and wrote a base class for a decoder based on these. Of course,
this is far from being anything else than some preliminary code, I have no
experience whatsoever in writing decoder plugins, so I am sure that I am
missing many things, but I think it could be a good start.

I see for example that work on GstBaseParse has already started using a
bug in bugzilla to track the implementation so I wonder if work on other
base classes should be done in the same way.

Also, since I'm quite new to writing gstreamer plugins and have no
experience writing decoder plugins in particular, I can probably do little
more than just refactoring common code from other decoders, (which is
basically what I've done so far). However, looking at other base classes,
it seems that they actually do more stuff than just refactoring common
code from other plugins, and I guess the same should be done in any other
base class. I hope I can get help with that from more experienced people,
since that is something that goes beyond my current skills, and without
that I guess a GstBaseDecode would not be all that useful.

I am looking forward to get feedback from you to know how I should
continue with this work or if you think I should invest my effort in some
other task more appropriate for  my current skills.

Iago