Rewrite of DVB related elements

[Russel Winder]

On Sat, 2016-03-26 at 20:20 +0200, Sebastian Dröge wrote:
> […]
> For background info, libdvbv5 is GPL licensed.

The Linux Media email list members are not picking up on my question
about licencing, but it has been an Easter break for the bulk of them
so I guess leave it a few more days to see if anyone addresses the
issue.

If libdvbv5 remains GPLv2 then clearly a reimplementation of the DVBv5
"middleware" is required for GStreamer since it require LGPL 2.1 or
more permissive dependencies. As with libdvbv5 this will have to be
principally DVBv5 but with a DVBv3 backward compatibility layer.

libdvbv5 has to be pure C with no dependencies other than libc. This
leads to what appears to be very primitive (i.e. 1960s) ways of
realizing some algorithms. Given GStreamer relies on GLib, a GStreamer
implementation of the DVBv5 algorithms would obviously be realized with
GObjects making the middleware API a lot more harmonious with the rest
of GStreamer, and just better in general.

Given the licencing issue and the MPEG-TS issue, there may then be a
strong argument for reimplementing the DVBv5 middleware, at the expense
of having to maintain it. However ongoing maintenance is a small price
given that currently the DVBv3 → DVBv5 problem is a huge problem for
GStreamer.

I will most likely look at parsing DVBv5 files (real channel and
virtual channel) using C (this is going to be very, very painful :-(
with a view to creating GObjects that are effectively maps (just
properties à la other GStreamer types).

Is there a preferred test framework for codes such as this? I generally
test C codes with Python+pytest.
  
-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
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