[gst-devel] D-BUS based multimedia server

[Owen Taylor]

On Wed, 2003-03-12 at 04:17, Steve Baker wrote:

> > I believe D-BUS could fit the picture here better than Bonobo so maybe
> > Gnostream could start making some sense again.
> 
> I've also thought about using D-BUS as a transport protocol for a media
> server. My immediate concern would be D-BUS not delivering the kinds of
> latency required by multimedia applications. It might not be engineered
> to optimally deliver continuous chunks of media data. Also any stream
> would have to go through *2* IPC message passes to reach a media server
> (app -> d-bus-daemon -> media server)
> 
> I'm sure the actual performance of this could be measured with some
> easily coded tests.
> 
> message-bus-list peeps might be able to enlighten us with their expert
> opinions as well.

I think going through the intermediate DBus server would definitely
be a mistake, in terms of latency and overhead, if those 
characteristics are important.

DBus is, however, structured to separate out the message-passing
layer from the server.

You could definitely use the message passing layer in an
multimedia server ... it should have pretty good latency
and reasonable overhead.

Still, I'm not sure that there is a huge advantage there over
something entirely custom, because you'd still want a wrapper
library around the DBus bits. I guess you'd gain something
by avoiding reinventing things like authentication.

Regards,
                                         Owen