[Kdenlive-devel] A possible solution to many problems

[Rolf Dubitzky]

On Thursday 30 January 2003 08:33 pm, Albert Cervera Areny wrote:
> Hi
> Yesterday I asked at the debian-kde list for aproject that had a library as
> the one kdenlive would need (i think :) They pointed
> http://www.gstreamer.net/
>
> Seems a good project (haven't looked at much detail) but it enables the
> transparent use of multiple codecs and provides a program for using streams
> just like artsbuilder does but with mixed video and audio. It will become
> the multimedia API of GNOME and looking at the FAQ they say that some
> bindings with Qt are already available.
>
> I think it is worth a read... What do you think about this?

   ;-))  

    I worked for quite a while with GStreamer before I started looking at 
other projects. GSTreamer is a very ambitious project, but they forgot the 
basic rule "keep it simple". The design idea might be pretty good, but the 
implementation is very unintuitive and complicated. You have to know a lot 
about the gutts of GStreamer to use it, which is very very bad, since the 
guts are _huge_ . They should take a look at xine to seen what a 
simple==good==fast==intuitive API can look like.
    Another _very_ bad decision of the development team was to make GStreamer 
a GNOME thing. I know they tried to get KDE involved and I know that KDE team 
was not very interested, worse, some KDE developers tink they could do with 
their aRts-xine kludge. Those guys just didn't understand what the difference 
between a multimedia framework and an mp3 player is.  Still I think GStreamer 
folks should have stayed as independent as possible from GNOME. I mean, they 
can provide GstPlayer and things, sure, but the whole syntax/setup/API , 
whatever is GNOMEish. Probably it's unavoidabvle since they are GNOME coders. 
Poor linux.
    Now the binding to Qt. First, we don't need Qt bindings, since piave 
doesn't use Qt which is a Good Thing. Second, the Qt binding are not only 
incomplete (not more than 40% of the API) but also buggy, and not in sync. 
Much more interesting are the general C++ bindings. They are a little more 
complete, a little less buggy, and more in sync. Still the are not yet 
usable.
    Having said all that, I still think that GStreamer is the way to go. linux 
needs a multimedia framework, and up to now I only see GStreamer. I am 
closely following the development and they are in a _hard_ freeze for 0.6.0 
since a few days ago. 0.6.0 is their firs release which will get major public 
attention since it is scheduled for merge with GNOME 2.
    Everybody who is willing to help me code input/output/effect plugins with 
GStreamer is very welcome.

Cheers,
Rolf

***************************************************************
 Rolf Dubitzky  
 e-mail: Rolf.Dubitzky at Physik.TU-Dresden.de
 s-mail see http://hep.phy.tu-dresden.de/~dubitzky/
***************************************************************