[gst-devel] Newbie Q: Connecting Pipelines

[Andy Wingo]

On Thu, 28 Feb 2002, rahul at reno.cis.upenn.edu wrote:

> Hi Folks,
> I am presently prototyping with gstreamer to use it in an astronomical
> data pipeline from a telescope. Its an unusual use, but there is a
> continuous flow of data in buffers, and gstreamer offers much pluggable
> capability to let researchers prototype data analysis pipelines on their
> laptops and then move them to production.

sounds interesting.

> 
> Each such pipeline consists of multiple gstreamer executables, presently
> communicating using written files (I will need to use sockets soon, are
> there any socket modules in development?). Now, to co-ordinate two
> different processes, I need to be able to do something like:
> Process A tells Process B:
> Hey, I finished writing file 1(buffer1), come pick it up. Then the
> input pad in process b will do the read, but not until then..

did i say interesting? i meant painful :)

seriously though, i think your best bet is to attempt to write some sort
of server. you will then need elements to interface with this server as
well, probably over sockets. but then you might want to allow rerouting
of signals through the server, which implies graph sorting and a kind of
mess. then what you see is you need some sort of media server. this, to
my mind, is jack. it's media-independent, mostly (by that i mean that
nothing other than audio has been implemented) and it would only take
moderate hacking to get it to work for you. and i'm going to work on
some jack elements for gstreamer, probably this weekend or next, which
will give your app access to jack's data.

you can take a look at jack at jackit.sf.net.

all of this is just mho, of course :)

best regards,

wingo.