[gst-devel] General questions about GStreamer

[Ronald S. Bultje]

Hi Marco,

On Sat, 2005-01-08 at 14:05, Marco Lohse wrote:
> NMM is not in an 'infancy state .. when it comes to the
> implementation'. NMM does offer much more than playing back .wav
> files.

We've said that for years, and nobody took us serious and we kept
telling them they were wrong. Sure, Rhythmbox was our cool showcase and
some people even ran Totem with a GStreamer backend, but in the end they
all used Xine. In the end, we've taken back most of our big words and
put money where our mouth is. During the last 6 months, we've (mostly)
stopped adding kinky feature and simply fixed stuff and made stuff work,
in such a way that you can now generally create a media player and just
expect it to work (obviously, still not as good as mplayer, but getting
closer every day). No matter what input you give it, no matter how many
buttons you press, no matter for bugs that are fixed in the current CVS.
It *just works*. Because of that, Totem (with the GStreamer backend)
will be accepted for inclusion in GNOME-2.10. Similarly, we hope KDE
will decide to use GStreamer as the default backend for the KDE-MM as
proposed for KDE-4.0. We see that as a sign of appreciation of our hard
work, and a confirmation that we've gone down the correct track. By
GNOME-2.10 (two months pending), we'll hopefully be rock-stable when it
comes to input and video playback, even though we don't handle WMV9 yet.

Now, what I imply with infancy is that NMM simply doesn't do that. You
don't have a Nero AVC codec, you don't handle broken AVI files produce
by the 1999 version of Virtualdub and its clones, you don't playback VCD
menus and you don't offer subtitles in your decoder modules, neither do
you offer the choice to switch between multiple subtitles (or audio
language tracks) or turn them off without losing sync, and so on.
There's zillions of such things that you don't handle. You may be able
to handle them in theory, but you still don't handle them. I may be
wrong according to you, but you still don't handle them. (And no, I'm
not gonna file bugs, I'm not an end user, I'm a peer reviewer who tries
to see how well competitors are doing. It's your task as a project
leader to guard the project and guide it in the right direction.)

Very little people care that you and we can stream video across a
network or make a video wall or have it synced on our Linux-running iPod
etc. They want a replacement for mplayer and xmms, one that works
better, is faster, looks prettier and has no regressions.

Ronald

PS this is not intended as a flame - I'm just trying to explain what I
meant by 'infancy state'.

-- 
Ronald S. Bultje <rbultje at ronald.bitfreak.net>