Discussion on FarSight

[Rob Taylor]

Looks interesting on a quick skim through. I'll have a good read
through, asap ;). 

Good references for reading up on the gstreamer framework structure are:
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/features/
and
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/doc/gstreamer/head/manual/html/index.html

The current kde gstreamer bindings can be found in kdenonbeta/gst. They
seem very complete to me, but need updating to the current api (and then
made to follow 0.9 development). Engin and I will be working on this.

The framework as it stands for 0.8 is a very nice architecture, but has
thread locking issues needs some extensions to its architecture for a
nice system to do out-of-stream data (such as is needed by protocols
like RTP/RTCP (my particular interest)). These issues are all fixed in
the 0.9 work which is now completed in the gstreamer core on CVS HEAD
(gst-plugins now need to be updated to the new schema). The new thread
locking work is spot on, as far as i can tell, with complete dogged
adherence to a locking order, and it's impressive to see in action ;)
( might be visible on stream [1] , but the camera placement sucked for
this recording.. :/ ) I should also point out that gstreamer is very
light in terms of overhead, and is already used in a few deeply embedded
systems.

well, that'll do for an intro for anyone not currently up to date with
gstreamer. Obviously I'd like to see KDE take gstreamer on, as managing
multimedia is an icky sticky task, and to my mind it'd be best if the
desktops can share the burden of making this work well. As it is we'll
be making some patches for kopete to allow it to do msn videoconf and
webcam via the farsight project [2] which intrinsically uses gstreamer,
hence how this discussion came up ;) 

One part of a desktop framework i suspect we'd like to see for this is
unified multimedia device management. e.g. how does the app know that
the user has a webcam and a firewire video camera attached, and prefers
to use the webcam as video source for chatting, but the video camera for
a video source when he's doing non-linear editing, etc ;)

Thanks,
Rob Taylor

[1]
http://stream.fluendo.com/archive/6uadec/Wim_Taymans_-_GStreamer_0_10.ogg

[2] http://farsight.sf.net

On Tue, 2005-06-14 at 10:39 +0200, Matthias Kretz wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'd like to chime in with the work I'm doing on a KDE Multimedia API. I'm not 
> 100% sure how this does affect your work but this has a potential of being 
> mutually exclusive and/or duplicated work.
> 
> Sorry for not being able to write a lot now. I'm really short on time but I 
> hope I can get back into the "discussion" in a few days again.
> 
> Anyway. The design document is written using a web based software my 
> university made me use :-)
> You can get access on 
> http://sysiphus.informatik.uni-heidelberg.de:8080/REQuest/SYSLogin with
> login: Guest
> passwd: Guest
> 
> Also you might want to take a look at branches/work/kdemm in Subversion.
> 
> As a sidenode for anybody able to make it: On Saturday, 25th Scott and I will 
> give a talk about the future of KDE Multimedia at LinuxTag in Karlsruhe (hi 
> Scott, guess we should get something going there :-) ).
> 
> As soon as I have more time I'll look into possible ways to work together on 
> this.
> 
> On Wednesday 08 June 2005 15:33, Duncan Mac-Vicar P. wrote:
> > There is a discussion ongoing on farsight (gstreamer based) for Kopete.
> > I am passing this for whose are interested in discussion (which can also
> > touch other issues about a video framework for KDE for other apps, ie:
> > kwintv)
> >
> > I am mailing all possible interested people, as I am not of the multimedia
> > area, I am trying to coordinate efforts so we don't duplicate stuff or
> > import random libraries in Kopete tree (like libmimic). Whose interested
> > can subscribe to fasight-devel at sf.net.
> >
> > Rob Taylor offered all his help on this. Taupter is already coding a video
> > framework / Kopete cfg module, Bille is interested in this stuff at a wider
> > level (desktop), and Engin have a GStreamer GUI wrappers (mail already
> > posted on KDE-Multimedia). Please forward this mail to those who are
> > interested on discussing this topic.
>