[gst-devel] Native Win32 build of GStreamer 0.8.1

[Julien Laffray]

>Julien Laffray wrote:
>> Hello,
>
>Hi, (french ?)

Yes I am French.

>
>> I am curious about that win32 port of Gstreamer. I have been trying several times to port it without any actual success, and i was wondering what you did to get it to work.
>> Have you already created some audio and video plugin to use it effectively on the win32 platform ?
>
>No, right now it's only "building". That means the software can be 
>compiled and only GStreamer so far. The next step will be to compile 
>some gst-plugins stuff. Both from command-line and VS.Net 2003. I really 
>doubt it will be possible to playback/capture in Windows with GStreamer 
>soon, conversion and misc processes that don't require hardware should 
>be possible... Also in CVS it is already possible to build GStreamer 
>using msys/mingw.
>
>The changes were just fixing some compiler incompatibilities. Not much 
>code has been rewritten for the port.

It is pretty interesting. After you wrote that, i went to Microsoft website regarding VS.NET 2003. Apparently, they have made an effort to be more compliant to the C and  C++ standard. That would explain you had less problem to build it. I tried since Gstreamer 0.5.x but i must say i am not an expert on porting, so i stopped at some point.
My goal was to port Gstreamer, so i could use Gstreamer with Clanlib, a cross platform SDK. Compared to SDL, Clanlib is higher level, and is offering an API that allow resources to be displayed to the screen in just a few lines. To give an example, it is currently using SDL for non accelerated drawing to the screen. One of the thing Clanlib is missing is video rendering support.
My goal was to use an unified API for all platforms that Clanlib supports removing some of the burden of maintaining it for different platforms. Gstreamer was one of the API i was considering mostly after the work done by the WIN32 GIMP team to port GLib and so on. 
My ultimate goal is to get decoding, converting plugins to work so i can display the results on a Clanlib Surface. Sounds would be also handled by Clanlib.

Anyway, on a more general note, using the SDL display plugin would be sufficient to get rendering and display. The same thing can be said about the sound. Having an SDL target would remove some of the problem before getting an highly optimized rendering target based on DirectX graphics.

Julien "Pelops" Laffray