[Matroska-general] Re: [gst-devel] Gstreamer and matroska - the opensource answer to VideoforWindows/AVI and Quicktime/MOV ?

[Steve Lhomme]

ChristianHJW wrote:

> Q : Whats the advantage of a framework, compared to a playback app ?
> 
> A : a. Its easier to develop video and audio apps based on the 
> framework, existing work can be reused, apps based on the framework can 
> support any format where a plugin exists.
> b. People can start making their own plugins, and have their own 
> video/audio compression solutions based on the framework, and simply by 
> plugin distribution everybody can use their stuff
> 
> While a. is a quite obvious advantage for the programmers, it doesnt 
> really give the users an advantage performance wise. If you ask most 
> desktop users if they know the difference between a player based on a 
> framework like Quicktime, DirectShow or Gstreamer, and 'self-contained' 
> players like VLC, Xine or mplayer, i bet less than 10% do know. The most 
> important thing for them is that they get their stuff to play, thats it.

This assumption depends on the "targeted audience". While it's very true 
among Windows users and probably Mac, it is less the case in the Unix 
world (things that just work are less common in the AV world ;). So it 
all depends on the audience. And GStreamer is clearly targeted at the 
Unix users.

> Gstreamer, but only after a win32 ( and later MacOSX ) port, could be an 
> answer here, while right now we have to make clear to them that we could 
> modify mkvmerge to mux their stuff into matroska, and its compiled for 
> Linux, Windows and MacOSX, but the only matroska video editor we have is 
> for Windows, and will handle only ( mostly ) tracks with VCM or ACM 
> compatibility mode, similar to AVI, and thats it. For playback, mplayer 
> and VLC would be the only viable x-platform options, means the guys have 
> to release special builds of those players, for each platform and with 
> their decoder included.

Because they don't share a cross-platform codec interface. (and this 
idea was considered stupid by the MPlayer ppl)

> For the time being it seems that only Helix is a true x-platform 
> multimedia framework, with a basic video editor and playback support on 
> all platforms. Their stuff compiles on Windows, Linux, MacOSX and 
> Solaris IIRC. But dont ask me if a codec developer would truely consider 
> to convince their users to use Realplayer to play their stuff ;) ....

It is very possible to make another player than RealPlyer based on 
Helix. Actually the Linux RealPlayer is not the same as the Windows one.