[gst-devel] float caps

[Andy Wingo]

Hi Dave,

On Fri, 2004-01-30 at 23:10, David Schleef wrote:
> I've spent some time thinking recently about creating a subclass of
> GstElement specifically for pro-audio streams.  This element would
> automatically handle all the caps negotiation for single-channel
> float audio, and could also be a hint to the scheduler that a group
> of GstProAudio elements can be scheduled as a lock-step group.

We would need to make a general specification of what exactly occurs
during state transitions and how exactly does capsnego occur and which
parts exactly can be overridden. This way of thinking is admittedly new
to me, but I'm thinking about the meta-object protocol in lisp or scheme
object systems like CLOS or GOOPS. This kind of design can be seen in a
1992 paper by Gregor Kiczales and John Lamping, "Issues In the Design
and Specification of Class Libraries". Unfortunately I don't have a URL
at the moment. Such is life with intermittent internet!

Imagine that we find a way to override capsnego, or make it simpler. We
need to do that via a well-defined interface. So in this quest (a 0.9
quest I think) we will be writing a post-hoc specification for the
GStreamer class library.

But you are probably right: it's better to have a unified caps-space.
More on that in the response to Benjamin.

Cheers,
-- 
Andy Wingo <wingo at pobox.com>