[gst-devel] rant...

[S Boucher]

Or why trying to do something with gstreamer is a threat to your sanity...

There are some mailing lists, but no one seems to read them, so that
leaves you with the documentation.

How's the documentation?  Vague at best.

Example 1:

The manual entry for gst_event_new_new_segment() says of the 'update'
argument "is this segment an update to a previous one".  The obvious
question for the reader is then: when should I set this to true and
when should I set this to false?  Or put another way, why do we even
need that flag?  This may be obvious to someone who spends his/her
time reading/writing gstreamer code.  Less so for someone trying to
understand how to use gstreamer.

Example 2:

gst_event_new_flush_start()/gst_event_new_flush_stop().  The documentation
seems straight forward enough, except its not clear whether there are
counter indications, or situations when this should or should not be
used.  You just try to use it, and if it seems to work, then you
assume everything's fine.  If it doesn't work - as is my case - you
scratch your head.  You sure can't refer to any worthwhile
documentation.  There's also no point in going to the mailing list for
the reason stated above.  There are always the GST_DEBUG traces, but
they are for the most part useless unless you are intimate with the
code emiting the traces.  You are left with digging deep into the guts
of gstreamer, not knowing exactly what to look for.  All of this
because the documentation is, hmmm, vague.


When I started to work with gstreamer, I tought it was cool what you
could do with it.  But after trying to use it beyond trivial cases,
gstreamer has most definitely succeeded in cooling any enthousiasm I
have towards it.

Now back to banging my head against the wall as to why I hear nothing
after flushing/sending a new segment, despite pumping data into the
pipeline :-)



      __________________________________________________________________
Yahoo! Canada Toolbar: Search from anywhere on the web, and bookmark your favourite sites. Download it now
http://ca.toolbar.yahoo.com.