[gst-devel] Common Opensource codec API , was : Re: the road to 1.0 and beyond

[ChristianHJW]

Guenter Bartsch wrote:
> hallo mike,
> this sounds like exactly the right direction for future developements to me. 
> a few questions though:
> - does ffmpeg's codec api have all features needed, e.g. stuff like
>   cache-local colorspace conversion (per-slice) like libmpeg2 has?
> - does ffmpeg have a plugin concept for dynamic loading of plugins?
>   if not, do you see a chance to talk them into introducing such a
>   feature? 
> - how about demuxer plugins? could this api be shared as well?

> how about other project? does anybody on this list have contacts and/or
> deeper knowledge about other multimedia projects in the free software
> world? i'm thinking of mplayer g2, videolan and gstreamer here.

Ronald 'BBB' Bultje, one of the core devs of the Gstreamer team is 
reading here AFAIK, so he could make contact i guess.

The Gstreamer people do have a nice API with their 'gst plugin API' 
AFAIK, but it doesnt help them a lot as its tied to Gstreamer as a 
framework and so no codec developers will support it natively. So, in 
the end, they have to make all the plugins themselves now ( i guess BBB 
is doing that ) and also maintain them.

If there was a common opensource codec API, a standard wrapper plugin 
could be enought for them maybe to cover most formats ?

I was talking with Erik 'omega' Waltinsen a couple of times on IRC, he's 
the founder of Gstreamer and does certainly know a lot about this kind 
of stuff, and he told me he had a neat concept in the very back of his 
brains already, but just no time to bring it onto paper. Maybe if you 
guys showed some real interest in cooperating with them here, you could 
start an avalanche ....

> my basic reasoning behin this is that now that all these different
> projects are getting close to their 1.0 releases (ok, not all of them ;)
> ) and so many developers have gained experience on how to design media
> players, codecs, do audio/video output, etc. it would be interesting to
> see if and how some collaboration between these projects could be
> established. 
> guenter

Exactly my thoughts also. Must be because we're both Germans Guenter :-D !!

Christian