[gst-devel] Integrating Ardour and GStreamer

[Christian Schaller]

Hi Ardour Developers,
I just rediscovered your project a couple of days ago in my bookmark
collection. I actually think I added it there as an interesting GTK--
based project. 

Anyway I have recently been involved in the GStreamer project
(http://www.gstreamer.net)
which tries to create a full fledged multimedia framework. 

Their design is very good and I have yet to meet someone who have looked
at it who dislikes 
the design :).  Anyway the project has been under development for around
9 months now 
and have come far. Recently the lead developer got hired by RidgeRun
Inc, to work on 
GStreamer fulltime. GStreamer now have around 5 core developers who work
a lot on it and about
10 more contributing plugins and patches.

The reason I am writing this mail is because I think that co-operation
between the Ardour and GStreamer projects would be a great idea.
Actually applications like Ardour was one of the original reasons for
creating GStreamer, but the work on the basic framework and other basic 
functionality has taken a lot of time away from building apps on top of
GStreamer. 
This has now started to change with among others the GANSO project
moving their video 
editing application to run on top of GStreamer.

Anyway the reason I think Ardour and GStreamer as such a nice fit is
that addition to having 
so many of the same goals when it comes to audio, they already utilize
much of the same 
underlaying technology such as Gtk\glib and libxml. For a full shortlist
of technical 
spesification on GStreamer take a look on the project frontpage.

So if Ardour and GStreamer started working togheter it would enable you
to focus more on the 
high-level functionality of Ardour and less of the low-level plumbing.
Some low-level work 
would probably be needed from the Ardour developer in order to make
GStreamer fit your needs, 
but I think you will be pleasantly suprised by how little. I see from
other discussion ('next 
step' etc.) on the list that you are considering a partial rewrite of
your projects anyway so this 
might be good time to unite forces to get to where we want to go faster.

The main advantage for GStreamer in this is that we get some
applications on board which makes sure that our audio support is as good
as it should be. While we in theory think we are getting there, having
Ardour and friends on board would be a healthy reality check for us.

Anyway please come by the #GStreamer channel on irc.openprojects.org or
email the development  mailing list to discuss things further.Our two
lead developers are Erik Walthinsen and Wim Taymans.  I have discussed
the issue with Wim and Erik they are of the opinion that Ardour is a
really great application. If you are interested they and the other
GStreamer hackers would be 
delighted to cooperate with you.

If you decide to check out the GStreamer code to have a closer look,
please get it from CVS. 
Stuff like the ALSA driver for instance is just found there. The CVS
version also has a 
removed the OSS compiletime dependancy and SPARC processor support. In
addition to a host of other improvements.

Sincerely,
Christian

P.S. For a nice overview of GStreamer I did an interview with Erik
Walthinsen a few weeks back.
You find it at http://www.linuxpower.org/display.php?id=205