[gst-devel] GStreamer status report, 28 September 2005

[Andy Wingo]

Hey folks,

It's a marvelous mercredi we have here, and a nice time for the second
edition of the GStreamer status report. So prop up your feet, grab a
GStreamer-approved beverage and relax as we go over the crucial
happenings of the last week.


The Bleeding Edge
-----------------

Stefan Kost is the hero of the week, for completely inlining all of
GStreamer's API documentation into the source code. Now the primary
source for all of the API documentation is maintained right beside the
API itself, which should help to increase the long-term quality of our
documentation. Go Stefan!

Interestingly enough, there were no actual API changes this week, as far
as I can tell -- just function additions, and moving around header files
as part of the documentation work. Added API includes structure field
and GstValue accessors for GstClockTime and GDate. Also,
gst_object_has_ancestor was made public, and fdsrc was ported and moved
to the core.

As an internal detail, Wim rewrote the state change algorithm this week.
Changing the states of a bin's children is a tricky operation in 0.9,
because changing state can cause elements to start pushing or pulling
data in another thread. Obviously this can only work if the other
elements in a bin are in the correct state to start processing when the
thread starts. The problem of determining the order in which the
element's states should be changed is complicated by allowing element
additions and removals from other threads while performing the state
change.

Wim solved this gracefully by implementing a GstIterator that iterates a
bin's children in state-change order, having done a topological sort,
and then folding over that iterator. Wow. I guess there's a reason we
keep him around.

Also, one of our primary data structures is acquiring a dependency on an
outside library. Congratulations to Jan Schmidt (thaytan)'s marriage to
Jaime Hemmett!


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

The "base" plugin set saw the normal set of bugfixes, some work on the
RTP payloader base class, seeking optimization work in playbin, and
general refactoring in sinesrc, the tcp elements, and audio sink base
classes.

News from the "good" plugins includes Tim Müller's fixing of OSS
playback of mono streams, fixes when demuxing AVI files containing
unknown types, refactoring in the level element by Thomas, porting of
auparse from 0.8 by Edgard Lima, and the normal batch of RTP work from
Wim.

In the "ugly" set, there were bugfixes in mp3parse and amrnbenc, and
Michael Smith wielded a sword of righteousness over the AC3 framer for
S/PDIF output.

Finally, the ttaparse and gsmdec plugins were ported to 0.9 by Arwed v.
Merkatz and Edgard Lima, respectively.


The Path To Release
-------------------

Andy Wingo proposed a tentative schedule[1] for GStreamer development
releases, culminating with 0.10.0 on 5 December. As part of that plan,
expect to see a 0.9.3 release of GStreamer and plugin modules on Monday
3 October. See the mail for more details.

[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.gstreamer.devel/13768


Bugs
----

Total number of GStreamer bugs as of today : 206
Number opened in the last week             : +18
Number closed in the last week             : -23
Net change                                 : -5

GStreamer is currently number 8 on the list of projects with the most
bugs in GNOME bugzilla, which is one place higher than we were last
week.

On the 0.8 side of things, Luca Ognibene has been doing some great
work dealing with bugs. He could use a bit of help now, though -- check
out his recent mail to the list[2] for ways you can help.

[2] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.gstreamer.devel/13808


Featured Application: Istanbul
------------------------------

Christian Schaller once again brings us this week's featured
application.

    Istanbul is a nice GStreamer based application made by Zaheer
    Merali. It gives you a small notification area icon which by a click
    of your mouse lets you stop or start recording sessions of your
    desktop. The resulting video is stored as an Ogg file. This is a
    quick and easy way to to create desktop videos demonstrating your
    favourite desktop application feature. And its all free software and
    using free media formats. You find more on Istanbul here:

    http://live.gnome.org/Istanbul

Thanks, Christian!


Well, that's about all for this week. Happy hacking!
-- 
Andy Wingo
http://wingolog.org/