[gst-devel] Re: Bonobo

[Nicholas Francis]

From: Erik Walthinsen <omega at cse.ogi.edu>

----- Original Message -----

> On Wed, 22 Mar 2000, Nicholas Francis wrote:
>
> > Hi. I've just joined the mailing list, and would like to introduce
myself.
> > I'm the main (read: sole) developer of the Trinity video editor, that
Wim
> > has also worked on.
> A quick search turns up a product by Play Incorporated, not much else.  Is
> that what you're referring to, or something else?

No, that is the other Trinity project :(
the main site is at http://members.xoom.com/NicholasF/


>
> > At GUARDEC, i spoke with a guy from Mexico about making a standard media
> > architecture for gnome, and GStreamer looks perfect for the task...
> Cool ;-)  Would that guy happen to be Miguel, maybe? (hoping, hoping...
;-)

No, his name is Joakim Ziegler. He is currently heading the development of
the new GNOME site. He is a Norwegian that works for a mexican company,
called Simplemente (http://www.simplemente.net).

>
> > However, I am wondering what plans there are for Bonobo - after having
seen
> > some demos, I am convinced that this is where the future lies.
> Probably, yes, but I haven't put any thought into it yet.  It depends on
> how Bonobo-ified you mean.  The basic architecture is based on GtkObjects,
> though I intend to move to the glib-provided object system as soon as
> possible, to remove the X dependency and other cruft.
In GTK+ version 1.4, GtkObject will be renamed to GObject and moved to glib,
so you might want to reconsider that :)

> These objects could
> optionally be wrapped in Bonobo, though to what effect I'm not sure.  Most
> likely there would be a Bonobo component that would "be" the outer
> Pipeline object, with all the other glue necessary to do autoconnection
> (i.e. play arbitrary media types).  This object would then provide all the
> normal interfaces (pause, seek, etc.) to any application that wants it,
> via a normal IDL.
This would be a nice way to do it - however, does it scale ? Just because
something is running over a Bonobo component, doesn't mean it doesn't want
to access things at a lower level...

One example is a distributed rendering environment - here, many machines
could be involved, with different elements being executed on different
machines...

>
> I was reading a recent article that quoted Miguel as saying the primary
> thing that got him started on the idea was IE's component architecture,
> and having a streaming-media setup like this in a component seems to be a
> critical step in getting GNOME more useful for a lot of users.

Definately.

>
> > I probably won't be doing any coding, as I have my hands full for
Trinity,
> > but I would love to take part in some design / bonobo implementation
> > discussions.
> Cool, have at it! ;-)

I've just done some brainstorming, and have quite a few notes on the
subject, unfortunately, I can't type them in as I attempted a real-life
pipeline:    Glass -> Coke -> Keyboard -> Panic -> Laptop disassembly ->
cleaning -> drying.... So my linux machine is down for the night :(

Anyways, I think we should try to see what actual uses a system like this
could be exposed to. At the Trinity website, I have a section called
'Architecture documentation', that you could read through. Anyways, a
docbook will find its way on the web tomorrow :)