[gst-devel] gstreamer plea for help

[Eric Zhang]

Hi, gstreamer-devel:

    I think this is not a very difficult problem for gstreamer 
developers. Maybe you can contact with them and provide a XO laptop to 
them for testing. All things will get to work soon if they have time.  :)

Eric Zhang

Daniel Drake wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am an intern at One Laptop per Child. We have developed a low-power
> rugged laptop for distribution to schoolchildren in developing nations.
> There are many many thousands of our XO laptops in the hands of kids
> around the world.
>
> We ship the XO with our own "Sugar" operating environment (based on
> Linux/Fedora). We also include a number of activities (applications).
>
> One of the most popular activities is Record:
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Record
> It is a gstreamer-based Python application which allows the user to take
> photos and record audio/video. Most of the kids who the laptops go to
> have never been near any camera so this really is a novel item for them.
> This activity is definitely one of the most popular that we ship, kids
> love it.
>
> Now for the problems.. we recently updated from an old version of Fedora
> 7 to Fedora 9, including a significant gstreamer update, and our Record
> activity stopped working somewhere along the way. The webcam video feed
> freezes when you run it and none of the capture functionality works. On
> IRC, Mike Smith commented that the gstreamer pipeline we use there are
> broken and was surprised that it ever worked.
>
> I went about cleaning up and reworking the Record activity to get it
> working again, and I was somewhat successful: most of the functionality
> is working. However we are left with significant regressions which are
> release blockers for us:
>
> 1. As a result of the gstreamer upgrade, when taking webcam input from
> v4l2src and displaying on-screen (or recording to file) there is a
> significant increase in delay - the video is lagged. This impacts
> lip-sync when recording a video with audio, because the audio is not
> lagged.
>  http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7609
> I have not had time to dig further yet.
>
> 2. A segfault condition
>  http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7887
> Have not had time to investigate
>
> 3. The biggie: our Record activity can now only record one video. When
> you try and record the 2nd, the gstreamer pipeline freezes without
> recording anything. This is a really big regression.
> http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7452
>
> I have spent many hours working on this, I've made progress on (3) but
> the bug is still there as it was before.
>
> I first isolated the problem to a simple test app:
> http://marc.info/?l=gstreamer-devel&m=121562099110189&w=2
> After a lack of response I got more acquainted with gstreamer than I
> would have liked and fixed a bug(?) in gstoggmux that was preventing
> this from working:
> http://marc.info/?l=gstreamer-devel&m=121804618419812&w=2
>
> Even after that fix, the bug still exists :(
>
> Tim-Philipp Mueller pointed out some bad behaviour in my app.
>
> Even after that fix, the bug still exists :(
>
> I re-isolated the problem to a new test app.
> http://marc.info/?l=gstreamer-devel&m=121848539729018&w=2
> I have unexplainable results here and don't know where to start fixing
> this. I can't even pinpoint the faulty component.
>
>
> We have "solved" this issue by restoring our old gstreamer builds from
> Fedora 7 and by reverting to our messy pipeline that should never have
> worked. Well, it works, and we are now as good as we were before. We'll
> be shipping gstreamer-0.10.12 with gst-plugins-base-0.10.12 and
> gst-plugins-good-0.10.5
>
> I am unhappy with this solution and hope that we won't be stuck with
> those old versions for much longer. But I've also spent many hours on
> this and so far have failed to get things working properly, and I don't
> see any other options for our immediate release timeframe.
>
> So here is my plea for help to get this fixed for the next release
> timeframe. What steps can I take to get this fixed?
> Are there gstreamer developers or experts who would be interested in
> looking at this? We can easily provide XO laptops free of charge to
> developers. I can tutor people getting up to scratch with
> XO/Sugar/Fedora development.
>
> Thanks,
> Daniel
>
>
>
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