GStreamer SDK – Preview release for Android

[Sebastian Dröge]

On Fr, 2012-10-05 at 11:05 -0400, cowwoc wrote:
> 
>     Okay, I'll bite :)
> 
>      1. Is there any reason that your distribution only contains
>         static library files? Do you plan on supporting *both* static
>         and dynamic linking by November?

These static libraries are linked into one large dynamic library that is
then used by the Android application. This was done because Android has
a limitation of 64 shared libraries per process, and you can easily hit
that with all the libraries GStreamer and the plugins depend upon and
the number of plugins.

Dynamic linking is nonetheless possible and there will also be a
zip/tarball with all the dynamic libraries and also the GStreamer tools
like gst-launch, etc. This is mostly for debugging or if you want to do
something really special. But for applications the supported way of
using GStreamer on Android will be the static linking route that is also
explained in the docs at docs.gstreamer.com (login as the test user to
see them). Using this static linking is btw very convenient, we made as
easy as possible. See this for more details:
http://docs.gstreamer.com/display/GstSDK/Installing+for+Android
+development


>      1. Can you please add build instructions to the Android page? We
>         should be able to build the SDK from source.

It's done the same way as for the other platforms, you only additionally
need to have the Android SDK and NDK and tell the build system where to
find it. This is not documented yet though.

Basically you need to get cerbero from
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/gstreamer-sdk/cerbero/ and use the
config/cross-android.cbc configuration file.

You can find some more information on cerbero in general in the build
from source section on
http://docs.gstreamer.com/display/GstSDK/Installing+on
+Linux#InstallingonLinux-buildfromsource

More or less the same applies for Android too. This also provides an
easy way for you to integrate other libraries and software to be used in
your application.

>      1. Do you plan on merging these changes into GStreamer's main
>         repository, and main branch? I ask because all other platforms
>         have been merged into GStreamer's main branch and it's not
>         clear whether you plan on merging these in the future.

Yes, all changes will be merged back upstream, including the new
plugins.
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