[gst-devel] Getting output capabilities

[Andy Wingo]

On Fri, 13 Sep 2002, iain wrote:

> I was looking for a way to get all the mimetypes that GStreamer can
> convert audio/raw to. I realised that being able to connect elements in
> all sorts of funny ways made this quite complicated, so I limited myself
> to one element. Then it became easy: Get the list of factories from the
> registry, get all their pad templates, get all the sinks that can accept
> audio/raw and see what they output.
> 
> Except then I hit a snag: Things like afsink don't have any src pads, so
> they take in audio/raw, but there's no way to find out what they output.

This, IMHO, is a flaw in audiofile (and libsndfile, for that matter) --
you can't hijack the output of the libraries. That's why afparse was
written, so that you can take your audiofile from the network or
whereever -- there needs to be an afwrite or something that would allow
writing to data in memory. It might be possible now with their virtual
file interface, but I'm not certain. Ignore these plugins, or rewrite
them if possible ;)

cheers,

wingo.