[gst-devel] Getting mindshare

[Myers W. Carpenter]

Wim Taymans wrote:
> My current goal is to have a real programmers manual, polish some stuff and
> start to promote things rather aggresively.

	Wim Taymans:  Not only does the man hack code, he can actually document
stuff too :).

> >         gnoMedia player - http://sourceforge.net/projects/gno-media/
> >                 gnoMedia is an attempt to bring an easy to use mediaplayer to                   the
> > GNOME desktop. We have seen a lot of players around but
> >                 they missed the simplicity of installing and use. Therefore
> >                 this project was started.
> 
> Right, this looks good towards the end user, but what for the programmer?

	I think these guys would be easy to win over if we can polish up
gstplayer.  Or maybe they come and do that for us.  There are about 4
developers involved.

> >         Libmedia - http://sourceforge.net/projects/libmedia/
> >                 Libmedia is the attempt to unify the APIs for the de- and
> >                 encoding of media (video, audio, still images). The first goal
> >                 is to create MPEG, MP3 and Ogg Vorbis decoders and provide a
> >                 Gnome Widget that can play these streams.
> 
> At least 1 year behind GStreamer.

	Only one developer on this project.
>>         MPEG-I video/audio library - http://sourceforge.net/projects/mpeglib/
> >                 mp3, mpeg video, wav,vorbis library. supports video cds,
> >                 seeking, vbr files,icecast streams, very easy to use!
> 
> oh great! MPEG-I. We can allready playback those things, no?

	Pretty well ( I get some sound distortions, but that is the topic of
another email).   2 guys on this project.

> >         Retina - http://sourceforge.net/projects/retina/
> >                 Retina is a library for processing media in real-time, such as
> >                 MIDI, audio, or video.

	These guys might be intrested but we'll see. 2 members.

> libAV must be merged. And that shouldn't take more than a few weeks.

	Since we never wrote any code, I think it's merged now :).


> 
> >         I'm thinking of evanglizing to some of these projects and seeing if I
> > can't convice some of them to add to the effort here rather that playing
> > with square things before finding round ones move better.
> 
> Good, I'm with you 100%. I want to go through some brainstorming with you
> about what and how we will do this. My approach till now was simply to
> incorporate all the efforts I saw into GStreamer and extend their usability.
> But porting all those codecs by myself is not funny.

	Right.... did you ever metion to the avifile guy about joining up with
our project?  Maybe we should try for the guy who did xmps too.

> >         There are a few things I think we could also do to broadcast our
> > existance a little better (not saying we should do all of them, just
> > ideas):
> >         - Change our freshmeat.net entry from Gnome/Core to X11/TV and Video
> > (this I did already)
> >         - Add Multimedia/Video and Mulitmedia/Audio to our Tove classification
> > topics (it's in the sourceforge.net project admin page so Erik would
> > have to change it)
> >         - Change our name.  GStreamer really doesn't evoke "Media Library".  My
> > sugguestion is "GNU Media Kit" or gmk for short.
> 
> I prefer something with GNOME in it. Today, anything with glib and/or GTK+
> automatically becomes GNOME related (well...). Can we call it GNU when it is
> tied to GTK+, GNOME, BONOBO, and all the other GNOME stuff?

	I think we should keep the core only tied to glib.  I know we are tied
to gtk right now because, but like it says on our homepage it's only
because the object model framework is in gtk and will be moved to glib
in the next version.
	I don't know if the KDE guys would be at all intrested in this given
it's in C and uses glib, but it would be nice to be open.
	I also want to build a videowall with this project, by sticking as many
cheap Video cards with TV Out in a computer and have gstreamer split up
the image and output to framebuffers attached to each card.  
	There isn't really a good advantage that I can see by binding the core
of the project to X/Gnome/Bonbo.

> >         - Polish up gstplayer and announce it on freshmeat.net.
> 
> Those are the things we need: Cool, polished multifunctional apps people want
> to use and talk about. We need to show that GStreamer is capable of much more
> than simple playback, I was thinking about pretty GUI MPEG2->DivX/MPEG
> encoders etc...

	That would work too.   How close are we to a real DVD player in
software?  I know we check for DeCSS code in our config script, but does
that actually work?  Maybe we can even get the oms guys working on this
too.

> Video editing would be cool too.

	Defiantly.

> >         - Come up with some short term goals, finish them and realise a new
> > version.
> 
> Yes, I see these things to be done:
> 
> short term release (0.9.9 or so)
> - manual
> - clean up the apps (gstplay, editor)
> - loud freshmeat announcements.

	Sounds good.  I think getting end users on board as quickly as possible
would be great.

	One thing is that I wonder if we could have the option to compile in
all the LGPL'ed codecs in to one big lib, to step up the loading time.  

	BTW, would it help at all to point out all the bugs I run into in
gstplay?  Perhaps on the bug report on sourceforge.net?

> (1.0.0)
> 
> - bonobo component for gstplay and get the Nautilus guys use it with an API
>   like:
> 
>     gstplay_new(<file>); gstplay_play(); gstplay_pause(); gstplay_stop();
> 
>   off course gstplay handles MPEG1/MPEG2/AVI/DivX/MP3/WAV/AU locally and
>   from a network.
> 
>   blow them away with both functionality and embeding possibilities.
> - GNOME control center applet. The user can choose its codecs, install, remove
>   and tune them.
> - Try to get the GNOME community to accept and use it. Try to get it into the
>   main GNOME installation.

	Sounds good.  Like I said before I think we can do this without making
gstreamer dependant on GNOME.

> current showstoppers might be:
> 
> - for the end user: no QoS. just one app.

	By QoS you mean we don't drop frames when it's too slow?

> - for the app developer: too much lowlevel things... need more specialized bins.
>   need better type registry.
> - for the geeks: no BONOBO/CORBA...

> still flaky/missing:
> 
> - xml handling
> - compile/build process. (working on that)
> - editor.
> - properties of the codecs.
> - v4l needs testing.
> - just a few native avi codecs.

	No quicktime.  Make use of the xanim codecs somehow.


	I too can't meet on IRC (I'm on the east coast, but I'm making just as
long of trip :).

	myers


-- 
You're just jealous because the voices only talk to me.