[gst-devel] Re: gstreamer gdk-pixbuf plugin

[Alexander Larsson]

On Mon, 2003-12-15 at 13:40, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-12-15 at 11:33, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
> > El lun, 15-12-2003 a las 10:39, Alexander Larsson escribió:
> > > I was just debugging some nautilus issue when nautilus started crashing
> > > when reading a directory with some avi files in it. Apparently there is
> > > now a gdk-pixbuf loader in gstreamer, and it was crashing trying to load
> > > some 700 meg avi. 
> > > 
> > > There are a few issues with this:
> > 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Well, then we won't install it by default.  I don't think it's meant to
> > be used (yet), Company was trying to figure out how pixbuf loaders work
> > and tried to implement it with GStreamer.
> 
> Ok.
> 
> > Incidentally, is it documented somewhere that external thumbnailers are
> > preferred over pixbuf loaders ?
> 
> Uhm? They are not. pixbuf loaders are prefered, being the built-in way
> thumbnails are generated. However, that was only ever meant to be used
> for normal images, not animations...

Hmmm. Maybe i misunderstood this question. You mean why its prefered to
write an external thumbnailer?

The reason that is prefered is two things:
a) the API is better, its "give me a thumbnail for this file", and a
video thumbnailer would generate a 128x128 thumbnail from some
semi-random frame (reading only the needed data), then adding the
roll-of-file frames at the edges.
However, the API for gdk-pixbuf is "load this entire file, at full
resolution", and I guess we'll end up using the first frame or
something, which is probably black for 95% of the movies. (I don't
really know what happens with the thumbnail if gdk-pixbuf returns an
animation)

b) Its usable for all sorts of files, not just images/animations.

c) Its better for system resource usage and performance if nautilus
doesn't load every library on the system into the nautilus process, and
if the thumbnailer has stability issues you'll not affect the stability
of the desktop.

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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
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