[gst-devel] auto-detecting sinks

[Benjamin Otte]

On 24 Apr 2003, Steve Baker wrote:

> There will be two new gconf keys, autodetect_audiosink and
> autodetect_videosink.
>
Quick question: Would it make sense to autodetect on an empty string
instead of adding a boolean property?

> When autodetect_audiosink is true an attempt is made to create number of
> audio sink pipelines. As soon as one succeeds it is returned as the
> default bin.  The order of trying for now will be:
> - alsa
> - oss
> - esound
> - any others?
>
Correct behaviour is checking for sound servers first and then using
native plugins, I think. It should probably check for arts, too (if we
have a working artssink, do we?)

> The pipeline will be fakesrc ! fooaudiosink and it will be played with 1
> buffer of silent 2 channel 16 bit 44100Hz audio.
>

> When autodetect_videosink is true the following will happen:
> - if Xv exists, return (xvideosink)
> - if sdlvideosink exists, return (sdlvideosink) (not until it becomes
> embeddable)
> - else, return (colorspace ! rescale ! xvideosink disable-xv=true)
>
If people have a videocard without Xv support they probably don't have a
performant computer either. Added to this is the fact that there is no way
i know that would make rescale adjust window sizes on window resizes
without weird hacks. For those reasons I wouldn't use the rescale stuff
and do it like mplayer: no scaling.

> Eventually audiosink and videosink gconf keys could be empty by default
> and could be populated the first time the auto-detection code is run.
>
I don't think it's a good usability idea to let apps change gconf keys
without the user requesting it.