[gst-devel] GStreamer status, 20 Sept 2005

Andy Wingo wingo at pobox.com
Tue Sep 20 07:46:21 CEST 2005


Aloha hackers,

This is the first installment of what I hope will be a weekly or
biweekly newsletter on the state of GStreamer. You will find in it a
discussion of recent API changes, bug and release status, and notes on a
featured application built with GStreamer. I hope you enjoy this first
one. Let me know what you think about it, good or bad, and especially
let me know if you want to write a paragraph or so about your area of
GStreamer interest.


Recent Core Changes
-------------------

The registry recently underwent a rewrite at the hands of David Scheef.
Developers will notice that there are no more pluggable registries or
registry pools, and that some of the plugin/pluginfeature semantics have
changed. Users will notice that there is no more gst-register. Initial
reports show this registry to be faster at rebuilding than the old one
and that run-time rebuilding actually works. Someone should port the
gnome-multimedia utilities to 0.9 to see how the changes affect Gnome
startup time :-)

Also, Wim Taymans checked in some bus-related changes. What was called a
GstBusHandler is now a GstBusFunc, to match the naming of GSourceFunc,
and its return value is just like any other GSourceFunc -- that is, TRUE
to keep the source in the GMainContext, and FALSE otherwise. Also, now
you can attach multiple bus watches, each listening to a different set
of events. A related change is that gst_bus_poll now returns the actual
message that was received, not just its type -- no need to explicitly
pop the message off the bus anymore.

In other changes, Stefan Kost checked in a patch to use GLib 2.8's
atomic refcounting for GObject, which was something Wim pushed hard for
in GLib's last development cycle. Of course, we still support the hacks
that allow GStreamer to work reliably with GLib as old as 2.4, but you
have to be careful when getting an object from GLib, as with
g_value_get_object.

David also recently removed our atomic memchunk and trash stack
implementations, which is related to ongoing work in GLib -- see
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=118439. This change shouldn't
affect anyone out there.

Thomas on the other hand has continued on his masochistic selfless quest
for quality, adding a 'make valgrind' target to the build. He will be
rewarded in heaven.


Buildbot status
---------------

The buildbot configuration has been partly upgraded for some slaves to
build the new modules. The Mac OSX buildslave is on a short holiday
while it's being upgraded. The Fedora Core 4 slave will now be
valgrinding and reporting leaks as failures.

Remember - if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the
problem ! Buildbot will still blame you if you keep committing to a tree
that's in a broken state. So hold off committing if the tree is broken
and you're not trying to fix it yourself.

We are still looking for more build slave platforms to add to our
system.  In particular, a Windows slave would be great.


Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch
----------------------------

Or, notable activity in the plugins modules. Have you checked out the
plugins documentation[1]? Go and see it and then tell Thomas how awesome
he is. The goal here is to have every element come with either an
example launch line or a small program that demonstrates the use of the
element. This is a very simple thing for new developers to be
contributing to and it helps in understanding how GStreamer works.

gst-plugins-base: Leak fixing, a new RTP payloader base class, 24 bit
audioconvert

gst-plugins-good: Work on RTP payloaders (AMR, GSM, H263, MP4, MPA),
wavparse updates

gst-plugins-bad: A ported SDL video sink, yay

gst-plugins-ugly: lame updates, documentation work

[1] http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/plugins.html


Bug Activity
------------

Total number of GStreamer bugs as of today : 200
Number opened in the last week             : +21
Number closed in the last week             : -22
Net change                                 : -1

GStreamer is currently number 9 on the list of projects with the most
bugs in GNOME bugzilla. Our project is a pile of bugs!

Luca Ognibene has put together a triaged list of bugs for the stable
series (0.8) here[2]. Some of these are low-hanging fruit, and it's an
easy-to-read list -- check it out if you have half an hour free
sometime.

[2] http://skaboy.no-ip.org/~luogni/gst08-bug-status-20050919


Featured Application: Banshee
-----------------------------

Christian Schaller lets us know about this week's featured application.

A lot of application development is being done using Mono and C# these
days and Banshee is no exception. Banshee is a music player being
developed with the support of Novell with a interface similar to what
you find in applications such as iTunes and Rhythmbox. Banshee is has a
lot of work being put in to support seamless syncing with Apple iPods
and includes its own GStreamer mp3 encoder for instance to acomplish
this. Doesn't yet support the DAAP music sharing like Rhythmbox does for
instance, but if iPod support is what you want then this is definetly
the application to look out for. Banshee is licensed under a MIT style
license. You can find out more on the Banshee homepage:

http://www.banshee-project.org/index.php/Main_Page


Well that's all for this week. Thanks to Thomas, Luca, and Christian for
their contributions to this week's edition, and if you want to write
something for next week, send it along to me, preferably before Monday.

Until next time,
-- 
Andy Wingo
http://wingolog.org/





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