goal of kde-multimedia ?

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

> Well, from my understanding MAS is meant to be an alternative to GStreamer, 
> not a supplement to it.  Specifically I know that the two groups aren't 
> particularly fond of oneanother.  Hopefully Leon can shed some light on this 
> matter.

When Leon and Mike from MAS met us, the GStreamer people, was almost two years
ago.  We went out a fair bit, discussing various things.  At that point, from
what we understood MAS wanted to be an X-integrated sound card abstraction
layer, offering the exact same thing for audio as X was providing for video. 
They were back then also considering adding pieces of functionality that are
in fact also in GStreamer's domain, like using compression codecs for
network-transparency and so on.  We discussed some options, like using
GStreamer for plugging the network-transparent part and so on.

(For the people that asked, GStreamer isn't network-transparent in the sense
that you can run parts of pipelines on different machines out of the box.
There is however nothing stopping it from making your applications
network-transparent, it just needs two plugins to make it work.  In fact, a
Pakistani developer we have has made a videowall application using GStreamer,
displaying a matrix movie on sixteen monitors using four pc's with each four
pci cards, and one controlling machine, with everything properly synchronized).

As for our respective fondness, I can't speak for Leon, but as a team from our
side we don't have any problems at all with MAS.  I met Leon again in Boston in
2002, he was kind enough to drive me around town on a few occasions there too,
and he has never given me reason to think he wouldn't be fond of us.  I guess
both teams realize that the other team has different focuses though, and as any
open source project either team probably has criticisms on a
technical/organisational level.

But this sort of differences is really no different than the sort of differences
between KDE and GNOME, and over the recent years both projects have amply proven
that, while the users might not always agree, there really are very good ways of
cooperating if it makes sense on a technical/organisational level to do so.

I'll try to get resubscribed to the list now that the topic isn't bug reports,
but multimedia future.

Thomas "geez, I was on this list for more than a year waiting for a GStreame
discussion, since I am a gst developers, and all I got was bug reports.
Not a month after unsubscribing you all start to discuss the interesting
stuff, damnit :)" Vander Stichele


Thomas