Gstreamer SDK Preview Questions

[Sebastian Dröge]

On Di, 2012-10-23 at 23:58 -0400, Sean McNamara wrote:
> Hello, 
> 
> Today I saw the very exciting Gstreamer SDK preview build with Android
> support. I haven't begun using it to build my application yet, but I
> did notice that the preview does not ship GstSoundtouch plugin from
> gst-plugins-bad. Is this an accidental omission or will this not
> appear in the final build?

We currently don't plan to ship the soundtouch plugin. Which part of it
do you need? The scaletempo plugin does the same as the pitch plugin and
has a less restricted license and needs no external dependencies.

> I noticed both other -bad plugins and -ugly plugins are shipped. The
> latter also seem to suffer from the very patent encumbrances that the
> Fluendo codec pack helps alleviate on the desktop (by at least making
> it legal to decode these formats in Gstreamer in MPEG-LA respecting
> countries) so I was a bit surprised to see mad and faad included. 

The developer of the app can decide which plugins will be included in
his app on a per-plugin basis. See the documentation about Android on
docs.gstreamer.com (with the login information from my first mail).

> My understanding is, libsoundtouch has manual assembler that's
> optimized for x86, but it should run on any CPU with the assembly
> replaced by high-level routines in C, which are already in the
> codebase. Hopefully the compiler and the brute force of modern ARM
> CPUs should together deliver good performance. So if libsoundtouch and
> the associated gst plugin build successfully on the targeted ARM
> platform of the SDK, I would really like to see this plugin added to
> the SDK. If there are build or performance problems with libsoundtouch
> on ARM, I have a very good rapport with its author and may be able to
> enlist his help. ;) 

That's not the problem, soundtouch works fine on all architectures :)
The reason really just is that we didn't consider soundtouch important
enough, but if you want to file a bug at bugs.freedesktop.org against
the GStreamer SDK we can reconsider that and probably add it at a later
point.

> My next question is, do the docs specify how to add a new plugin to
> the build if building from source? I have another plugin (containing
> only a source element) which I want to integrate in my custom build of
> the SDK, written in C and using standard autotools build system and
> libsoup. Any tips would be appreciated. Is it necessary to build the
> entire SDK in order to add another plugin shared object using
> "external" sources, or can it be added to the existing build by using
> an identical toolchain? 

You can either build the complete SDK yourself and integrate that plugin
like any other software package. Or you can just build that plugin
directly with your application.

> Lastly, I would pay good money for the Fluendo decoder pack (mainly
> interested in audio) to be available on Android for developer and/or
> end-user licensing. I am hoping that this is on Fluendo's radar given
> how many resources they have invested in Android already.

That's something you would need to ask Fluendo, but I guess the chances
are good ;)
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