[gst-devel] tags and metadata

[Benjamin Otte]

On Wed, 21 Jan 2004, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:

> The properties view makes a very clear distinction and shows them in
> different locations.  One reason for is is quite simply, as stated
> before, that the actual metadata is supposed to be EDITABLE.
>
That's actually even harder, because even tags might not be editable at
all. You don't know if there even is a tag writing element for the format
you extracted tags from and you don't know if this format supports editing
what you thought would be a "tag".
You can do pretty good assumptions about editability, but you can't know
it. A DRM'ed file might not even have editable tags at all.

> > Caps should be used when you have a set of "capabilities", that you want
> > to intersect, fixate or negotiate. Tags should be used when you want to
> > describe properties of a data stream.
> > I guess that points pretty much directly to tags...
>
> Probably - otoh right now the caps are what get signalled after
> negotation.  Does this mean I should also convert them to tags ?
>
Haha

> Let's not pretend this is the first time I bring this up.  Let's not
> pretend that you did not specifically ask for GStreamer 0.8 to be the
> one to go into GNOME 2.6
> Whether we like it or not, at the point we proposed that, we also forced
> ourselves to make sure that the applications already in GNOME were
> ported to 0.8 functionality-wise.  I can somehow understand you not
> wanting to do the work, and I don't mind.  But it's something you should
> have thought about when proposing it for GNOME 2.6.  I'm not really sure
> you've actually ever run nautilus-media based on previous comments on it
> :)
>
I still consider nautilus-media the most broken invention in the history
of GStreamer and still fail to understand why something like this was ever
included in Gnome.
It's not part of what I consider GStreamer, so there was no consideration
on my part about this package. And its maintainer did not contact me
with his specific issues until well after the API was frozen and
tagging had already gone in for 2 months.

> I think we all didn't really take a good look at what it means to
> propose this, and we probably bit off more than we could chew - but
> that's not helping us much at this point.  Right now we need to Get It
> Done, which is what I want to do, so let's not point fingers but move
> along and tell me, how can I get the functionality we had working in 0.6
> back in 0.8 and what do I need to complete ?
>
I still fail to see the problem in nautilus-media as it is now. You just
extract the tags and put them in your properties view. Just like you did
before.

Benjamin