[gst-devel] gstreamer in an embedded environment

[Michael Nelson]

I'm considering gstreamer for an embedded device evironment (TV
set-top-box). It seems like a great fit because software could then be
written to be agnostic to the type of hardware in the box. All the apps
have to do is use the autoplugging to construct a pipeline and the
appropriate elements are assembled according to what is present. I have
a couple concerns however.

First is the lack of the concept of a hardware connection between
elements. For example in a digital TV box the demodulator is hardwired
to the demuxer. Since both are customizable I would like to have
gstreamer elements representing each but have the connection between
them default to a hardware connection with no buffers passing between
them. (Both usually have the ability to write buffers to and from
memory, but why do that when there is a hardware connection?)

Any thoughts on the right way to implement this?


Second is the size of gstreamer. By my calculations gstreamer requires:
libgst  219K
libglib 166K
libgtk  137K
libxml  386K

I know there is working going on to remove the dependence on libgtk and
all the X dependencies and that will help a lot. To further reduce the
code size I am thinking about removing all XML functionality (and
therefore libxml) and stripping out portions of glib that aren't used by
libgst. Any other ideas?

Thanks.

-- 
Michael Nelson
Utah Development Group
Liberate Technologies
801.453.7031 (office)
801.518.5550 (mobile)