Multimedia Frameworks (was Re: aRts documentation)

[Tim Jansen]

On Tuesday 22 October 2002 18:17, Jason Wood wrote:
> The big choices seem to be aRts or GStreamer, and whilst I am not expecting
> either to completely fulfill my needs (otherwise video editors would be ten
> a penny), I am willing to work on one of them until it does.

I am biased, of course, but I believe that using the GStreamer wrappers costs 
less time than adding full video support to Arts. To use Arts you would need 
to re-design MCOP and the scheduler in order to support Video. You would also 
need to implement (wrap) all the codecs and filters that your app requires. I 
doubt that this is possible in less than a man-year, at least not with a set 
of codecs and filters that is comparable to GStreamer's. For comparison,  
writing the Qt/KDE wrappers, the examples and the small player library took 
me 3 weeks of fulltime work.

On the other hand, the GStreamer wrappers are not ready to use either. It is 
quite likely that you will encounter a few bugs in the bindings and in 
GStreamer itself (AFAIK you would write the first video editor that uses 
GStreamer). And if you want to write a plugin yourself, you either need to 
implement it as a native GStreamer object, or you have to extend the 
wrappers.

bye...