[gst-devel] D-BUS based multimedia server

[Owen Fraser-Green]

Hi,

Following on from the unconcluded discussion on sound (preferably
multimedia) servers I'd like to throw another idea into the pool. I was just
following the status on the D-BUS project
(http://www.freedesktop.org/software/dbus/) and it occured to me that maybe
there lay in there a solution to the biggest obstacle for the idea of
Gnostream as a multimedia server, namely bonobo with respect to KDE interop.
It strikes me that D-BUS is an altogether more suitable (simpler, thinner
and hopefully acceptance in both Gnome and KDE) way of doing much the same
thing I'd planned to do with bonobo in Gnostream. The basic concept instead
of the client application using gstreamer directly:

+------------+
| MP3 player |
+------------+
|     UI     +
+------------+
| gstreamer  |
+------------+
   |       |
   |       |
   ^       v
  file   audio

the client talks to a server which does all the gstreamer stuff for it:


+------------+
| MP3 player |
+------------+
|     UI     +
+------------+
      :
      : <some protocol>
      :
+------------+
| server if  |
+------------+
| gstreamer  |
+------------+
   |       |
   |       |
   ^       v
  file   audio

There is one server which handles the streaming needs of all the clients.
When a network is involved this happens:


+------------+
| MP3 player |
+------------+
|     UI     +
+------------+
      :
      : <some IPC protocol>
      :
+------------+                      +-----------+
| server if  | .....................| server if |
+------------+  <some IPC protocol> +-----------+
| gstreamer  |                      | gstreamer |
+------------+                      +-----------+
      |                                   |
      |                                   |
      ^                                   v
     file                               audio


I believe D-BUS could fit the picture here better than Bonobo so maybe
Gnostream could start making some sense again.

Cheers,
Owen