[gst-devel] DVD autoplugging and Python

[Ronald S. Bultje]

Hi Martin,

On Mon, 2005-06-06 at 14:26 +0200, Martin Soto wrote:
> A question about autoplugging for DVD playback, and, hopefully, Python.
> After a reimplementation of the DVD virtual machine code (that, as
> usual, took longer than expected) I managed to get the Seamless DVD
> Player to a point were it is able to properly and quite robustly handle
> the menus in most commercial DVDs.  One big issue is affecting it still
> though, namely, it is not able to play PCM sound properly.

I'm interested in joining efforts to do this differently. I've already
told you this multiple times, and you've told me you believed it would
be rather hard, but I've managed to get the full engine working inside
dvdnav, or well, mostly. As a result, Totem, with no (*) changes
whatsever, now plays DVDs with menus. My engine isn't as good as yours
yet, e.g. I cannot select an audio stream in the menu and have Totem
pick that up in the menu (or the language switching happening in the
first place :) ).

Are you interested in helping out with the last pieces and having true
DVD support as an integrated part of GStreamer?

Also, I'd like all changes that will be applied to dvddemux in the
future to be well tested with Totem. I've seen that seemingly innocent
changes, like removing the block-timeout (it's there as a safeguard
against deadlocks) from playbin (yes, I tried that as a clean-up - do
not try that at home :) ), can have quite bad effects on DVD playback,
and your mimetype-check in dvddemux of a while ago, which was also
seemingly innocent, broke Totem's DVD playback as well.
I really want Totem to play DVDs with menus, so let's make sure that any
future changes to dvddemux do not break Totem. I'm not asking you to
switch and develop Totem from now on, don't get me wrong, but please be
careful from now on when applying changes to dvddemux and related DVD
elements. Totem really is a very important application for GStreamer,
it's pretty much our prime-time video-playback show-off on the GNOME
desktop. Bad bugs there make us look bad in total. :).

Cheers,
Ronald

(*) that's a lie, I needed to make it recognize subpicture-streams as
subtitles (in addition to text streams), so it would let me select
language for subtitles in the menus.

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