Amarok vs Gstreamer

[Andrew Turner]

Jon,

I don't know if you're aware, but gstreamer radically changed its API
for 0.10 (compared to 0.8). Amarok's gstreamer engine has yet to reach
the point of stability with 0.10 and, since Amarok 1.4, has no longer
supported gstreamer 0.8. At the moment, it seems the gstreamer engine
is disabled even in SVN (although that's not always the case).

For general purpose use of Amarok, use xine. Properly configured (ie
not cripped by your distribution), it can play almost anything. If you
just want to use Amarok, get xine and use its engine. If you really
really want to use gstreamer, I've given some advice later on.

To Amarok Developers:
I just noticed that the relevant lines seem to have been last changed
during revision 563697 by mkossick. This seems rather strange to me,
as it would imply that gst hasn't been enabled even in Amarok-SVN for
quite a few weeks (fair enough). Even more strange is the fact that
it's a reversion of the Dynamic Collection merge, which shouldn't have
touched that bit of code at all. But maybe that's one of the reasons
it was reverted. So, maybe this doesn't matter at all, although maybe
the gst engine could be re-enabled now 1.4.3 is out the door.

To Jon:
What may help you is looking at how it was re-enabled in the past,
such as in revision 541050:
http://svntalk.pwsp.net/project/amaroK/revision/541050

If you know what you're doing, you can probably just reapply that
commit by using a suitable svn merge command (or you could copy and
paste and use the patch command).

As for your second question, Amarok's debugging statements will show
up on the commandline if you configure with --enable-debug=full. I'm
not really sure what you mean when you say "its invocation" though;
gstreamer functions are called all throughout the gstreamer engine
(unsurprisingly).

Andrew

On 05/09/06, Jonathan Ryshpan <jonrysh at pacbell.net> wrote:
> I'm trying to get amarok working again with gstreamer.  It worked fine
> till recently, but upgrades to amarok and/or gstreamer-0.10 have broken
> it.  So far I've downloaded amarok from the svn archive and built it
> successfully using amarok-svn.sh .
>
> However, I haven't been able to enable gst.  The tests for gst are
> commented out of the configuration.in file, and when I remove the
> comment markers ("#"s), configure.in is rebuilt with the gst tests
> commented out again.  I haven't been able to find the configuration
> files that amarok-svn.sh use as input while building configure.in .
>
> Questions:
>
> (1) What files are used to control building configure.in ?
>
> (2) When I get amarok built to use gstreamer, how can I get amarok to
> print out its invocation of gst?  Amarok has a lot of debugging
> features, but there doesn't seem to be much info on how to use them.
>
> Many Thanks - jon
>
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