[gst-devel] multifilesink and proposal to merge it with filesink

[Ronald Bultje]

Hi,

On Thu, 29 Jul 2004, Zaheer Abbas Merali wrote:
> What you, and David has said in this thread, is we need a libegg style
> "throw new plugins" gst-plugins-extra cvs module.  I do not think gst-
> sandbox is good enough for it, because it would need to be structured
> like gst-plugins is currently.  I think it would be a good idea to have
> such a cvs module, with the view of the useful ones being moved to gst-
> plugins.  However, this has the following disadvantages:
>
> i) GStreamer is not as widely used as gtk+ and libgnomeui, so app
> developers are going to be reluctant to take elements from gst-plugins-
> extra CVS module.  (Is this a valid disadvantage?)
>
> ii) There will be multiple versions of elements hanging around in apps,
> potentially with different behaviour.  If an element is moved to stock
> gst-plugins from gst-plugins-extra, it may have issues in these
> applications.
>
> There are probably other disadvantages, but there are advantages for a
> structured element dumping ground.

Havoc spent some time on such issues in his comment on p.g.o. You might
want to read that. The interesting part is namespaces: gst-plugins-extra
should *not* use the standard gst namespace. Each plugin in g-p-e should
be prepended by gpe- or so. That makes sure there'll be no conflicts.

Egg solves most problems already using automated update scripts.

> I do not buy your argument regarding multifilesrc, the property I added
> fixes multifilesrc.  The reason I added it as a property is so as not to
> break current behaviour.  If you look, the patch is ultra-small and
> ultra-clean.  Also, I do not agree with the design of the multifilesrc
> element.  However I do not want to fix that until 0.9.  My application
> does not use multifilesrc and has no plans to.  I wanted to fix it so it
> works as it should.

It worked fine. The question is: what do we want it to do? You seem to
want to use it as a multiple filestream input element. It works, however,
as a multiple *buffer* input element. I'm not sure if you're familiar with
mjpegtools or ffmpeg, but multifilesrc is supposed to be the equivalent of
jpeg2yuv (mjpegtools) or -i jpg (ffmpeg). Each file is one buffer, and the
input stream is a series of images. This is for creating stills SVCDs,
stills DVDs or such things.

In other words, your intended multifilesrc is completely unrelated to
multifilesrc. Please don't change multifilesrc. You don't fix it. You
don't break it either. You change it's behaviour, and that's just as bad.

Please, again, make that a separate element. This is not right.

Ronald