gst-plugins-bad: sndfile: don' t decode formats that are better handled by other elements

[Tim-Philipp Müller]

On Mon, 2014-08-25 at 15:58 +0200, Stefan Sauer wrote:

Hi,

> > sndfile: don't decode formats that are better handled by other elements
> >
> > In particular: flac, ogg, pcm, au, aiff, wav.

> Is the lower rank not enough? Whats the exact problem this fixes (it is
> not clear from the bug and description to me).

Is there a positive case to be made that this element should handle any
of these formats? It will likely do a poorer job for all of them.

It doesn't fix any specific problem, but seems a good idea to me from a
maintenance/QA point of view.

I don't see a non-hypothetical scenario where it wouldn't be more
desirable to get the other elements installed instead.

One problem is that if this element has a lower rank, one of the proper
plugins that are supposed to handle the format in question is not going
to be auto-installed via the plugin install mechanism, and/or the user
is never alerted to the fact that the proper one is missing. This might
give people the impression that 'GStreamer plays xyz poorly'. or
'GStreamer doesn't handle xyz' (because sfdec doesn't support xyz, such
as mp3/dts in wav perhaps).

And then it only works in pull mode of course.

Cheers
 -Tim