GStreamer API over RPC: does it make sense?

[Fedor Lyakhov]

Hello GStreamer developers,

I'm working on a Media Redirection feature
(http://www.spice-space.org/page/Features/MediaRedirection) for Spice,
a system to access remote virtual machines (similar to VNC or RDP, but
better).

Essentially, we want to optimize following use cases in VDI:
* Playback of remote media resource, i.e. a media stream from remote
server (e.g. user watches Youtube)
* Telecommunications, i.e. IP telephony

The idea is to have e.g. media player at virtual machine (at VDI
server) to link against a stub library instead of normal GStreamer.
This library is capable to send API calls to real GStreamer library
located at user's PC (client) - the actual RPC implementation can be
done via Google Protocol Buffers for instance. The transport of RPC
calls will be done within dedicated Spice channel (or e.g. over simple
TCP connection, to begin with).

My question is - does this scheme make any sense to you? Is it viable?
I'd appreciate any comments!

Maybe it has been considered by someone before?
What potential issues we'd need to overcome? Any blockers?
Maybe we can do this for part of API, sufficient to run common media
applications? We're concerned with following application types mostly:
media player, web browser (e.g. Firefox using GStreamer) and IP
softphones (e.g. Empathy).

-- 
Best regards,
Fedor