shared wasabi implementation

[Magnus Bergman]

On Fri, 23 Feb 2007 10:57:43 +0800
"Fabrice Colin" <fabrice.colin at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 2/23/07, Magnus Bergman <magnus.bergman at observer.net> wrote:
> > I haven't checked dijon yet and might have missed something. I
> > assume filtering refers to converting documents into formats that
> > indexers can understand (usually plain text and XML), right?
> >
> Yes, that's right.
> 
> > Why not just use gstreamer for this? I have done this myself, but
> > not to gstreamers full potential. The indexers could just tell
> > gstreamer which mimetype(s) it can handle and pass some sort of
> > document identifier. Gstreamer can then figure out how get the
> > document and deliver it in a format the indexer can understand.
> >
> I know next to nothing about GStreamer but I would think it would only
> help with getting to the metadata held in audio and video files, eg
> tags, track length, resolution, etc...
> That said, it still would be a welcome addition to Dijon.

What gstreamer does is to set up a pipeline for handling media
streams in a very generic way. The pipeline consists of a source
element, any number of filter elements and a sink element (which could
be an indexer of a document viewer). There are currently no filter
elements for handling text (except for subtitles and such). But filters
for converting, let's say word documents to plain text, could very well
be implemented as gstreamer elements. The benefit from this is that the
documents are streamed instead of first downloaded (if necessary) and
then converted (all in-process), which is of course much faster. And
gstreamer can automatically figure out which elements are needed and
set up an appropriate pipeline for doing the job.