Status reports towards 0.8: was Re: [gst-devel] Totem, Gst-Player, libgstplay showstoppers

[Christian Schaller]

I guess what would be good is if everyone wrote a short mail to the list
with what their hacking priorities are before 0.8. ie what do they plan
to look at and in what order. Julien lists some of the issues in these
mails, and there are probably other things other people are looking at. 
So to get stuff on the table and get a feel for what is getting looked
at when; a short mail from David, Benjamin, Ronald, Thomas, Leif, Iain,
Jeremy, Maciej and others about their priorities towards 0.8 would be
really great in order to get a feeling we are all on the same page and
also make sure that no major issues are falling between chairs here.

Christian

On Mon, 2004-01-26 at 16:58, Julien MOUTTE wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> Here is a list of show stoppers for audio/video playback in the gnome
> desktop. If by any chance some core hackers want to dedicate some time
> helping in the gnome interaction direction this is the todo list...
> 
> Here is the gstplay pipeline :
> http://getcontrol.sourceforge.net/files/gstplay_pipeline.png
> 
> 1) This pipeline uses switch to have both visualization and video output
> of spider connected to the video sink while waiting for identity to tell
> if there's video in the pipeline. If video is detected, visualization is
> then disconnected. That works just fine. The issue is that if no video
> output comes out from spider then video_queue is empty and switch tries
> to gst_pad_pull from that pad which locks forever. So audio playback is
> broken with visualization enabled.
> 
> Proposed solutions :
>  a) Use gst_pad_select to get buffers only from pads that provides some
> in switch.
>  b) Make gst_pad_pull timeout somehow and let switch knows so that it's
> not pulling for nothing there.
>  c) Make switch chain based so that buffers are pushed to it.
> 
> 2) Seeking is completely broken, both for audio only and video files.
> That's really a critical bug and we have to get that fixed ASAP !
> 
> Proposed solutions :
>  a) Find when that has been broken. IIRC it was working before caps
> merge.
>  b) Write down how seeking should work and check that it's implemented
> correctly.
> 
> 3) Tagged audio files are making problems in spider. Benjamin keeps
> repeating that the gstplay pipeline is hard to debug. Well i can
> understand that but still we should be able to debug why spider is not
> playing those medias.
> 
> Proposed solutions :
>  a) Attach benjamin on a chair with a gst-debug-log-level=5 under the
> eyes so that he can fix spider to play those files.
>  b) Enforce a) somehow ;-)
> 
> 4) Informations about codecs. xine provides the app developer with some
> informations about video/audio codecs. I need to get those informations
> from gstplay pipeline to compete with them.
> 
> Proposed solutions :
>  a) Add some gst_element_found_tags calls in decoders so that they tell
> about the codec format they are about to decode.
>  b) Add some gst_element_found_tags calls in demuxers so that they tell
> about the different format of video/audio...
>  c) Invent a new communication system/signal for that kind of stuff.
> 
> That's all for today. If i have some more coming out of my head i ll
> mail again.
> 
> Julien,