[gst-devel] Comparison: MAS, GStreamer, NMM

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

Hi Marco,


> (1) Allow the playback of an encoded audio file (e.g. MP3). This will
> result in similar setups: a component for reading data from a
> file connected to a component for decoding connected to a component
> for audio output. (Together, this is called "pipeline" or "flow
> graph").
> (2) Set the filename of the file to be read.
> (3) Manually request/setup this functionality, i.e. no automatic setup
> of flow graphs.
> (4) Include some error handling.

I'm curious about (3) - why should it not be done automatically ? So
you're saying you just want an application that can only play mp3's ?
Personally I think a much better test would be to have a helloworld that
can take a media file and just play it, whatever type it is.  That's
what users care about, anyway.

> In a second step, we would like to extend the helloworld program with
> following feature (helloworld II):
> 
> (1) Add a listener that gets notified if the currently playing file
> has ended, i.e. this listener is to be triggered after the last byte
> was played by the audio device.

What sort of thing is your listener ? An in-program function callback ?
Another process ? Something else ?

> In a final step, we would like to extened the helloworld program
> (helloworld I) to allow for distributed playback (helloworld III):
> 
> (1) The component for reading data from a file should be located on the
> local host. The component for decoding, and playing the audio data should
> be located on remote host.
> 
> Notice that this third example should also demonstrate how easy (or
> painful) it is to develop networked multimedia applications using the
> particular framework. We hope that this will finally show that
> developing distributed multimedia applications means more than "well,
> simply write a component for streaming data and put that into your
> pipeline".

Not sure why the third is important.  While it's important for
multimedia frameworks to be able to do things like this, I don't see the
value of this for a desktop environment.  Can you provide a use case
where this makes sense ?

Also, I don't think it's smart to do this for audio only.  We all know
audio is the easiest to get right anyway, and audio presents a lot less
challenge to frameworks.

I'm sure I could come up with other things that are important to be
tested, I'll think about it some more.

Thomas

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