[gst-devel] General questions about GStreamer

[Hynek Hanke]

On Fri, Jan 07, 2005 at 01:49:24PM -0800, David Schleef wrote:
> There is some support for a protocol unique to GStreamer that
> allows you to pass streams directly from a GStreamer pipeline
> on one machine to a pipeline on another machine.  And it wouldn't
> be too difficult to write a library that handles network-transparent
> distribution and control of GStreamer pipelines.  The fact that
> nobody has done this, IMO, shows how non-useful this feature is.

Thanks for all your clarifications. I'd like to continue this
discussion.

Maybe I'm looking for a solution in the wrong place (media framework),
but how would you handle these situations:

1) The user is accessing his machine remotely. He can easily redirect
X Window to his machine, but how does he redirect audio in some easy
way? (e.g. for the blind this is important)

2) The user works on his own machine, but wants the media (in our case
ogg decoding and speech synthesis through an external component) to
be processed on a more powerful remote machine.

It might look a bit complicated, but both are examples of situations
we are dealing with in real world in our organization.

> > 3) Have you talked to the people from MAS and NMM? Why are there
> > three projects doing mostly the same?
> They're not.  MAS is primarily focused on moving audio from an
> application to a sound device, perhaps moving the audio over the
> network.

Perhaps this is the current technical state of things, but regarding
the stated goals and design decisions, MAS is much more complex than
just transfering audio. My understading is that it provides a framework
to handle all kinds of multimedia and in many aspects it tries to accomplish
the same as GStreamer.

> It contains some components you might be able to use
> internal to an application, but you could not write an application
> like rhythmbox with it.

Why? Because of missing plugins or because of some more serious
resons?

> MAS is also not actively developed anymore.

It is. I don't know how fast or efectively, but a new release is
being prepared AFAIK.

But don't get me wrong, I personally have many issues with MAS too.

> NMM is much like GStreamer, except that they have network
> transparency as a primary objective.

Do you see communication over network as an obstacle to something?
In other words, is this difference a reason why both projects should
exist?

With Regards,
Hynek Hanke