[gst-devel] GStreamer as Gnome multimedia backend through Totem

[Julien MOUTTE]

Hi dudes,

As some of you already may know GNOME community is again wondering wether or not using GStreamer as multimedia backend for GNOME Desktop multimedia player. We (Hadess and me) have been focusing our effort in making Totem working with GStreamer backend...

We are close to reaching a stable player but we still miss the stability that 0.6.2 is supposed to bring.

Here are the main arguments presented by the GNOME release team preventing from using our backend for Totem in Gnome 2.4 :

1) Lacks of error handling.
2) No informations about codecs used when spider autoplugs a pipeline.
3) Lack of codecs.
4) Crashes.

1 and 4 can be fixed simply by releasing 0.6.2 with Company's fixes to pad refing which makes libgstplay stable and should enable the PIPELINE_ERROR signal reporting what happens.

2 could be fixed with some caps added by spider maybe giving feedback on autoplugged pipeline (like metadata), or digging in the autoplugged bin to find element with specific Class and their name..

3 I guess in this point many people will complain that there is no support for .ogm, many divx, wmv and so... I think that's just lacking a better integration of ffmpeg (maybe using a more recent version) and fixing spider.

It is now time to decide wether we do it or not. Most of the stuff is ready only a 0.6.2 release is needed (including backport of Company's fix in 0_6_BRANCH). Maybe some hacking in spider and ffmpeg i don't really know...

If we don't want to go in GNOME now that's just fine for me, Xine will go instead of us and i can focus again on my personal project :) But if we want i guess we have to give a big strike on that 0.6.2 and i will take care of Totem having it all integrated.

So... Tell me your thoughts :)

-- 
Julien MOUTTE - jmoutte at electronic-group.com
C.T.O.
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