[gst-devel] Re: Helix Player virtual team meeting

[Ronald Bultje]

Hi,

[added CC to gstreamer-devel]

On Tue, 2003-12-09 at 19:28, Lee Braiden wrote:
> This might be a bit provocational (sorry), but I'm wondering why you don't 
> work with the gstreamer folks, and just make codecs or bugfix the ui?  That 
> would make helix a MUCH better opensource project, imho.

Being one of the GStreamer developers, I'd like to advocate this point
too. Given the current license of the (closed-source) Real codecs
included in Helix, it's hard for us to add proper Real support to the
default Gnome media framework. If you guys are looking for true
integration in the Gnome desktop, GStreamer is the way to go. We already
provide Gtk+/Gnome video widgets, integration in the file manager, etc.

I'd love to wrap up all of the Real codecs myself, but the license (as
far as I've read it) doesn't allow for this to be included in
distributions, which makes it sort of useless. There's lots of options
(but all require some action from your side) to overcome this:

* change the license to allow wrapping inside opensource media
frameworks. We'd be happy to wrap them up. In the best case, change it
in such a way that distributions can include it in their default
install.
* create your own plug-ins (outside of the GStreamer Plug-ins package)
and make it available to the public on your website. Not as good as the
first option, but still good. Note that we try to make the various
future GStreamer 0.8.x releases to be API/ABI stable, so this should
work quite well for you. We won't guarantee ABI/API stability, but
that's more of a lousy disclaimer than something you should really worry
about. The 0.6.x series have been API/ABI stable, too.
* opensource your Real codecs so we can integrate them directly in the
GStreamer Plug-ins package (hey, I can always try. ;) ).

If you're interested in any of this, let us know. We'll be happy to
cooperate. Whichever of the options you choose, we all win.

Ronald

-- 
Ronald Bultje <rbultje at ronald.bitfreak.net>
Linux Video/Multimedia developer