[gst-devel] auto-detecting sinks

[Steve Baker]

On Sun, 2003-04-27 at 04:26, Benjamin Otte wrote:
> 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?

Maybe, but I was thinking that people could switch between
auto-detection and whatever wacky custom pipeline without deleting their
custom pipeline when they switch back.

> > 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?)

If the ESD_NO_SPAWN thing works then I'll try this. I don't know the
status of the artssink - I suspect its bitrotten.

> > 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.

It would be nice if rescale worked but it will be left out until it
does. Couldn't xvideosink change its caps when it gets resized?

There could be another option without rescaling for people with slow
PCs.

> > 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.

Fair enough, but I would have thought an auto-detected default would be
better than an empty one. It would only get populated if empty.
-- 
Steve Baker <steve at stevebaker.org>