[gst-devel] GNOME & GStreamer: take two

[Christian Schaller]

On 07 Aug 2001 22:53:11 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Christian Schaller wrote:
> 
> > This is and updated todo list for GStreamer in relation to GNOME. If
> > Erik and Wim thinks it is ok, I will send it to the gnome-love mailing
> > list to see if we can get people to help us with some of these tasks.
> > 
> > Christian
> > 
> > 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.). 
> 
> 
> The capplet should be set to "Guess my audio environment", seeing which 
> audio output plugins are available on the platform, then trying them out 
> one-by-one, moving the previous success to the top of the list.

This seems like a good idea, I will put this in to version 0.3
> 
> 
> > 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.
> 
> 
> No, it actually shouldn't be needed to run gstreamer-register by hand at 
> all. I guess that it should be part of the gst_init().
>   If the user doesn't have write access on the global registry, write a 
> user-wide cache.
> 
> 
> > Other settings?
> 
> 
> Yes, things like which decoder/encoder to prefer when there are multiple 
> ones available for a media-type: "mpgparse ! mpg123 or mad for mp3 output ?"
Part of me agrees with you, part of me feels that this should be choosen by
each application.

 
> > 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.
> 
> 
> The capplet is just an application like any other. The few dependencies 
> would be glib and xml. You can't do much less.
> 
> 
> > This applet should use GConf to store its settings in order to allow
> > sysadmins to set systemwide defaults.
> 
> 
> I don't think this is needed. These are preferences, not settings (ie. 
> they can't be wrong). And you would add GConf, OAF (iirc) and Orbit 
> dependencies on your backend ;)
Actually, Sysadmins would want to be able to lock down such things to avoid
having to support users who have messed up their configuration. Also
from a GNOME perspective one stop shopping for settings is prefereable.

If we use the Gconf interface and not bonobo-config I think we will not
need the Bonobo-activation (OAF) or Orbit dependency. 
 
> > b) Provide patches to the gnome-media package to use GStreamer. This
> > also includes patches to the GNOME media panel applets. 
> > 
> > c) Simple library for supplying play_sound etc. This library will/should
> > long term replace the one in gnome-libs. (Timeframe available for GNOME
> > 2.0, recomended API for GNOME 2.2, only such API for releases after
> > that.) 
> 
> 
> Martin has actually setup CSL to be used only as a module. We just (sic) 
> need to write such a module that uses GStreamer instead of CSL.
Ok, if Erik and Wtay thinks the current API is sane then I guess 
this is a better option. Also if the current API is the one that ships with 2.0
then not changing it do has a value in its own.
 

> > d) Menu icons and entries for our sample applications. 
> 
> With nice icons ;)
Well, think my first step would be no-icons, then adding icons as soon 
as some graphics artist takes pity on us :). Actually I tried getting Fredric 
(who did the Galeon art) to help us, but I have been able to get in
touch with him for some time now.

> > e) Bonobo-media working. Working bonobo-components giving access to
> > GStreamer functionality. Erdi Gergo is working on porting this to the
> > GNOME 2.0 platform and hope to get it working.
> > 
> > f) Nautilus integration. Video preview, embeding in Nautilus, backend
> > for audio-preview feature etc. Not an immediate issue as GStreamer will
> > not be a part of the core development libraries for the 2.0 release.
> > This is a task more suited for the GNOME 2.2 release.
> 
> 
> I guess these 2 go together.
They can, but I would guess that is an implementation issue.


> > g) Mozilla/Galeon plugin. Steve Crouse has made the first release of
> > this available from: http://mozstreamer.mozdev.org/
> 
> 
> Well, I don't know how Steve's architecture for mozstreamer is, but it 
> seems like it could be a wrapped-bonobo componenent. Mind you that I 
> don't know anything about how to write a Mozilla plugin.
>