[gst-devel] Re: ranks (was: Re: [gst-cvs] tpm gst-plugins-good: gst-plugins-good/ gst-plugins-good/ext/cdio/)

[Jan Schmidt]

On Fri, 2006-01-20 at 16:26 +0100, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller
wrote:
> Hi,
> Haven't been thinking about a solution for dynamic ranking, 
> but I have been thinking a lot about the problem space of assigning
> rank. The unwritten policy so far have been to give the highest rank to 
> the one plugin which has the best quality ('quality' unfortunately being
> a quite subjective or at least hard proven). I hope/think we should be
> able to keep doing this even with the entrance of Fluendo's plugins. I
> assume the community would be ok with for instance mad being set to
> primary rank, while the Fluendo mp3 plugin to secondary, while for
> windows media the open source stuff is secondary and Fluendo's primary
> as long as the who gets to be on 'top' is chosen based upon 'which one
> is the best'. In most cases I think it be an either or anyway, but
> doesn't hurt planing for the case where people have both.
> 

In the longer term though, we may have companies producing plugins who
aren't so tightly coupled to GStreamer itself. I can easily imagine that
they're not going to want to rank their plugin Secondary , even if there
is a Free-but-illegal-in-some-places alternative that is of higher
quality.

I'm like Benjamin, I don't know of any way to automatically determine
the rank, because I can't think of any criteria that GStreamer can
determine on its own for that.

I DO think that, in the absence of an automatic mechanism, it would be
useful to be able to override the rank that's been compiled into a
plugin using a config file that users can modify in their home
directory, similar to how xine does it at the moment. 

I don't know whether it's also useful to put defaults for other element
properties in such a config file, but I can think of use cases where it
would be (for example) useful to override the default buffer size for an
audio sink. 

It's an open question in my mind whether there's enough of these use
cases to justify a config system, but I like the idea of having a way
for users to adjust the rank and inform GStreamer of their preference.

J.


-- 
Jan Schmidt thaytan at noraisin.net

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