Multimedia Frameworks (was Re: aRts documentation)

[Zack Rusin]

On Tuesday 22 October 2002 14:12, Tim Jansen wrote:
> 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.

ACK. GStreamer developers many times expressed interest in working 
together with KDE developers. Admitably, lately I haven't been 
following GStreamer development as much as I used, but I always liked 
their architecture.

> 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.

Hmm, just wondering - how many people would actually be willing to spend 
time designing and writing a completely new multimedia framework for 
KDE? For the longest time I wanted to get more involved in multimedia 
on KDE and as I start thinking about my TODO for 3.2 I'm trying to see 
where we're standing. So, maybe someone could find some time to answer 
any of the following:
a) How completely is the xine extension?
b) Tim, is the inability to write plugins with your GStreamer wrappers 
their biggest shortcoming? (as I don't think it's such a huge problem)
c) do we have any decent GUI for either ogle, mplayer or xine (I'm 
interested in a way to play DVD movies on KDE).

Zack

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