[gst-devel] metadata handling
Thomas Vander Stichele
thomas at urgent.rug.ac.be
Thu Oct 24 06:48:06 CEST 2002
Hi all,
I would like to restart the discussion on metadata ;)
There are some points i'd like to make and questions I want to ask.
First of all, my personal opinion is that it is highly critical that we
handle metadata, and that we handle it well. The number one reason for
this is that GStreamer does a very good job of liberating any application
that uses it from required dependencies on the underlying libraries. If
every application depends on GStreamer, and then on all of the underlying
libraries for the metadata only, then that is stupid ;)
Also, we have always claimed that "it is trivial to create a pipeline and
use it to get the metadata", so I think it's time we start to actually do
that... I believe it should be indeed simple, but it would make sense for
us to provide the mechanism to do that and at the least have a clear
explanation of it.
Thirdly, if for some reason GStreamer isn't "mature" enough to do that
currently (it's probably not ready for all formats yet), then I think we
should take the easy way and use the underlying lib directly. The plug-in
uses the particular lib anyway, so let's virtualize the metadata handling
functions in those libraries.
There is one point I think is important that we should look into.
I don't see how currently how we would do something as simple as "change
the name in the metadata to ...". It seems as though using GStreamer
currently we would do a decode/re-encode with new metadata, which would be
silly. How, in GStreamer terms, would we handle this basic operation ?
Apart from that, we should probably not currently worry or be troubled by
questions we used to have like "what happens to the metadata if we mix two
files with metadata" ? I don't think the user expects us to make a good
guess as to what the resulting metadata ought to be ;)
Jump in !
Thomas
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