[gst-devel] General questions about GStreamer

[Maciej Katafiasz]

Dnia 07-01-2005, pią o godzinie 23:53 +0100, Hynek Hanke napisał:
> > > 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.

That's what it states on its homepage, not what it does. I don't think
anyone has ever seen MAS doing anything else than transport audio, and
there's a reason to that, because it simply doesn't do that :). And
won't start doing overnight, either.

> > 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.

MAS is very much vaporware. Some big words, and mailing list that has
seen something like 2 years gap between posts (that was last time I
checked, dunno about now, but I suspect it didn't magically turn into
fully working, actively developed solution).

> > 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?

No, we simply don't think total, absolute network transparency is goal
important enough to make it primary objective of media framework. If you
really want fancy things like that, that can be added later on. In other
words, we know for sure that people will buy library that's good in
playing their movies, but we aren't so sure about clustering your PC and
PDA. If there's a need, there will be code, too.

> In other words, is this difference a reason why both projects should
> exist?

They exist because people write code for both. That's the simplest
answer :)

Cheers,
Maciej

-- 
Maciej Katafiasz <ml at mathrick.org>