GStreamer on freedesktop

[Scott Wheeler]

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On Tuesday 09 December 2003 23:57, Andrew Sobala wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-12-09 at 22:18, Allan Sandfeld Jensen wrote:
> > The problem with gstreamer, is that the design choices are by no means  
> > agnostic. It's designed to fit in and fill some of the voids in the 
> > GNOME-environment, and while it could be used _from_ KDE, it could never 
> > work a part of, as I does things in it is own way
> 
> Can you give any concrete examples of this? I'm interested.

Sure -- KDE and GObject use different event loops, you have to build something 
to mitigate between them.  The object model is native to GNOME; it's not to 
KDE.  There's a learning curve there and it's one that KDE people don't get 
terribly excited about.  For the GNOME folks again, it's native.

So -- again, it's clear that something like GStreamer is a "tighter" fit with 
GNOME.  They're made of the same building blocks in a sense.  Now on to the 
KDE bit...

In general I don't advocate the use of GObject based stuff in KDE -- most of 
the time it's just not a good idea because of the boundaries mentioned above.  
This isn't because GObject is evil or something like that -- it's just that 
it is in a sense "forein".

However multimedia is a special case because it's complex, generally object 
oriented and event driven.  From KDE's side of course the ideal would be to 
have a QObject based multimedia system written from the ground up in C++ -- 
but no such system exists.

Looking at what's available and assuming that we won't be writing a new one in 
the next year or so you see that most of what's out there is C, has a 
non-QObject based object model and its own event loop.  Being pragmatic the 
question really isn't over C and C++ and QObject and GObject but rather if 
there a reason to prefer a system that rolls their own object and event 
system over one that is based on GObject.  At least superficially I don't see 
any reason to assume GObject to be worse than the others.  (But here I'm 
drifting into stuff that's more appropriate on the KDE lists.)

And to tie this back to the real topic -- I'm still of the mind that GStreamer 
is a reasonable thing to have around.  Nothing's lost if we don't use it in 
KDE and I don't think the Freedesktop guys are short of space on the CVS 
server.

(Note with all of these things that I'm differentiating between Glib and 
GObject; for C programming I find little to object to in Glib.  I'll avoid my 
thoughts on C and C++ for the moment.  :-) )

Cheers,

- -Scott

- -- 
If you want to get laid, go to college, but if you want an education, go to 
the library.
- --Frank Zappa
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