KDE 4 Multimedia: The Answer

[Neil Stevens]

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On Monday February 23, 2004 5:19 am, Gioele Barabucci wrote:
> Neil Stevens wrote:
> > It seems plain to me now that in KDE 4, GStreamer on MAS is what
> > should be used.
>
> We will surely need to patch part of the code of the solution we choose.
> You know, using an infrastucture intesively you discover bugs,
> limitations and so on.

Yup, fortunately we've had two developers working in that area for some 
time.  Tim Jansen has the gst wrappers in KDE CVS since August 2002, and 
Scott Wheeler uses gst in Juk in KDE since KDE 3.2.

> Most positive points are known, let's talk of the negative one.
>
> GStreamer:
> - written in C, GLib based... I fear this combination. Look at this
> example stated "how to write a simple typefinder"
> http://www.freedesktop.org/~gstreamer/data/doc/gstreamer/head/gstreamer/
>html/GstTypeFindFactory.html#id3578370 - network trasparency?
> - where are the benchmarks? how fat is it?
>
> MAS:
> - written in C (but well written) with a simple API (too simple?)
> - support only for OSS and Solaris sound devices
> - where are the benchmarks? how fat is it?
> - not so active development just some Imakefile adjustments; take
> current CVS and try
> find -type f -printf "%TY%Tm%Td  %p\n" | grep -v CVS | sort -n

Please point me to a portable, modular multimedia interface that does audio 
and video that isn't written in C, and I'll gladly support it.  Even the 
audio-only aRts depends on glib2 now.

Also, KDE is adopting many things based in C.  Language issues alone are no 
reason to reject it.

As for benchmarks, there needs to be something to compare them with in 
order for the benchmark to mean anything.  What other portable, mdoular 
multimedia interface that does audio and video did you have in mind?

> > Why?  GStreamer and MAS are part of the freedesktop.org effort, which
> > KDE is increasingly following:
> > http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/Home
>
> I hope this is not the only reason :) not everything at freedesktop is
> release quality (by now).

Well, GStreamer is release quality enough to be used in KDE, and I'm 
talking about KDE 4, so there would be plenty of time to work out issues.


- -- 
Neil Stevens - neil at hakubi.us

"It's snowing, it's snowing! God, I hate this weather."
    They Might Be Giants, __New York City__
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