multimedia infrastructure

[Florin Andrei]

On Mon, 2002-12-30 at 14:54, James Richard Tyrer wrote:
> Florin Andrei wrote:
> > 
> > Just imagine you have that installed on your system, and link different
> > applications to it: all of a sudden, Konqueror can play DivX files
> > "natively" (well, through xine-lib, of course); or any other application
> > you choose.
> 
> Yes, this appears to be the KDE way of doing other things.
> So, we would have a library, a stand alone player, and a Kpart for Konqueror.
> Sounds good to me.
> Did you think that KDE should just use Xine (directly) or that we should make our own library?

I'm glad that at least someone understood the point of my initial
message (having a multimedia library as a foundation for everything) and
didn't took it as a "yet another My Player Is Better" lame type of
thing. After all, i'm not advocating for a particular player, but for
the idea of a multimedia foundation.

Well, there are advantages and disadvantages to both ways.
Use the original xine-lib, you don't have to worry much about
maintaining it, but the API might change.
Fork it, but then you have to sort of take care of it.
I'm slightly in favour of using the original library. After all, you're
not forced to upgrade the version you're providing, but instead KDE can
declare some xine version as being the "official" KDE version. Or
something.

And hey, while we are at it, how about Gstreamer?

http://www.gstreamer.net/

Over xine-lib, it has the advantage of being specifically designed to be
a multimedia foundation for a complex environment (after staring for a
long time at the specifications and API, i had the impression that xine
was designed to be just that: a multimedia library to build players on
top of it, while Gstreamer seems somewhat closer to what i'm trying to
suggest here).
It has the disadvantage of being in an earlier phase of implementation,
and less tested.

Long term, i'd feel inclined in favour of Gstreamer: start implementing
hooks to it now, so that after a while all the functionality will be
there, and quite powerful and adequate for a desktop environment.
Short term, xine makes more sense: one could make it basically right now
a multimedia foundation for any desktop environment, but it wasn't
exactly designed with desktop environments in mind.

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/