[gst-devel] GStreamer and GNOME intergration

[Christian Schaller]

Hi,
I was thinking that it might be nice to get a clearer picture of what
needs/should be done to make the use of GStreamer for GNOME developers
and users as pleasant as possible in preparation for GStreamers
inclusion in GNOME 2.0. The reason I want to do this now is because I
think if we know what needs doing we can probably recruit some new
developers through the gnome-love mailing list to handle some of the
issues.

My suggestions are as follows (and I hope those if you with the
technical knowledge to do so correct my technical misgivings.):

a) Create a GNOME control Center Capplet for setting global settings for
GStreamer & GNOME apps. Audio output format is the most important here
(ESD, ASD, artsd, OSS, ALSA, Solaris Audio etc.). 
Could be some other settings which also could be done this way.
A GUI option to run gstreamer-register might also be nice to put here.
Other settings?

The backend to this capplet should probably be done with as few
dependencies as possible since a KDE/GNUStep/XFCE frontend etc. to the
same settings could be of interest.

b) GConf backend to gstreamer-register? 
Not sure about this one, but currently you need to be root to run
gstreamer-register. So using GConf/bonobo-conf might be advantagous to
work around that. Another solution is having gstreamer-register also use
a local settings file under the $HOME directory. The later solution
might be better if there are no extra advantages of to storing the info
in GConf. Anyway for people not using GNOME a no-Gconf solution still
need to be available.

c) Provide patches to the gnome-media package to use GStreamer. This
might be a perfect task to send to gnome-love as soon as our API
stabilises.

d) Menu icons and entries for our sample apps. Easy task which I
actually having planned on doing for a while. Plan on waiting with this
until gstmediaplayer theoritically can play something with crashing at
the end.

e) Bonobo-media working. Working bonobo-components giving access to
GStreamer functionality. 

f) Nautilus integration. Video preview, embeding in Nautilus, backend
for audio-preview feature etc. This work have already been discussed by
the Nautilus hackers and will probably get done by some of them as
GStreamer gets more mature. Adding it here for completeness.

g) Mozilla/Galeon plugin. Steve Crouse already working writing this, but
I am mentioning it here since it is a killer feature for GNOME browsers.

h) cothreads cores for all GNOME plattforms. PA-RISC and MIPS are the
two missing here, plus we need more testing of the other non-intel
platforms we already support.
 
Anything else?

Christian