[gst-devel] NMM

[Ronald Bultje]

Hi Karl,

On Mon, 2003-10-27 at 10:01, Karl Schmitz wrote:
> Now I was wondering what you gstreamer guys think about NMM ?

Looks interesting, basically the same that Erik started years ago with
GStreamer. ;). This probably means that they lag approximately three
years to where we are today.

> Why should I develop for gstreamer and not NMM ?

We're established, a standard; most people - by now - know us and
actually like our project; we're part of Gnome (since 2.2) and KDE is
considering us (with C++/Qt wrappers) for inclusion in their next major
release (4.0) - this also means that most distro's ship us by default
(e.g. RedHat). We've had most complete rewrites of systems because of
shortcomings and we've started to stabilize our architecture by now -
not because we have to, but because we're able to. We can handle
(read/write) most well-known file formats in our current HEAD CVS and we
handle several exotic formats that noone else has even heard about.
NMM is new, has no user base, will have to fight the same arguments that
we've had throughout the years, I expect, and they'll have to implement
support for all media types that we (or mplayer, or xine, or ...)
already have. Apart from that, they're in C++, which gives them no
chance of being included in Gnome except if miracles happen.

I wish them goodluck, it's good to see some competitors. However, it's a
long way to get where we are today...

One specific comment: they mention network-transparency. That whole
concept is very overrated. Network-transparency has no use in 99,9% of
the cases (do you see win32 users play back their mp3s on one computer
to listen to it on the other?) and severly slows down the whole process
because - locally - all data must be copied from one element to the
other (pipes, sockets, fifos, whatever) instead of passing refcounted
pointers. We provide network-elements as a special case, not as a
default, because of this.
I don't care if my sound-server is network-transparent. I care if it
uses sound card DMA. And none currently does (well, Jack could in
theory, but neither Gnome nor KDE ship Jack by default). Now *that* is
an issue.

Ronald

-- 
Ronald Bultje <rbultje at ronald.bitfreak.net>
Linux Video/Multimedia developer