[gst-devel] blockers for 0.8.0

[Ronald S. Bultje]

hi,

Thomas wants to release 0.8.0 monday, which is great. I'd like to see
some issues fixed before we do that.

1) libgstplay uses switch. Switch doesn't work, see #136197; it pretty
much kills libgstplay here locally. I'm wondering on why it works for
some others, it's as if I have an ancient version of switch or so. I'm
really clueless here, the code that I see in gstswitch.c here *can not*
work. Totem cannot ever have worked for anyone with that code. It's
weird. If the code I see locally is the actual code, then we have an
definate blocker here.

2) playback speed issues. I see some movies that play too slow right
from the beginning. Others play too slow after a few seconds. According
to Benjamin, the issue is a possible deadlock as in that the audioqueue
is empty and the videoqueue is full whereas the audioclock waits for
more data. I also sometimes see the osssink getting links with
samplerate=1kHz, and it then sets that on the device, which generally
has a lower limit of 4kHz. It doesn't error out here, so we're doomed to
playback too slow here. This one seems to be a combination of issues. I
fixed some (osssink-related, see gst-cvs at ...), but there's still a lot
of issues remaining here, it seems... :/. Not sure how much of a blocker
this is, but it'd be nice if others could help debugging this, could
confirm it, etc.

Less important:

3) faad negotiation is broken for a matroska file I have. Would be cool
if it could be fixed. Didn't test .m4a. 6-channel MPEG AAC files try to
play all 6 channels on osssink, which has nice ear-results. However,
somehow, capsnego succeeds. Don't know why. audioconvert doesn't help
(pretty obvious; capsnego succeeds, so audioconvert functions as a
passthrough). A problematic testfile is the starwars trailer from
http://samples.matroska.org/.

That's all I have. I can "sort of" play my movies (tested mpeg, avi,
matroska, quicktime) in totem right now (using the patch in #136197), I
guess that's quite acceptable for a 0.8.0 release. I've never had too
many issues with Rhythmbox.

If ALSA keeps on buggering, I might work on ALSA in gnome-volume-control
after 0.8.0, I'm willing to install ALSA for this one time. Seems like I
have little choice. Anyone else working on this (pretty please)?

Ronald
-- 
Ronald Bultje <rbultje at ronald.bitfreak.net>
Linux Video/Multimedia developer