From: Christian F. K. S. <Ur...@li...> - 2002-08-22 16:09:40
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Hi, I felt that in order to both get a better sense of direction and to see where we are at this time I try and write up this status report of GStreamer. It is meant as a starting ground for a little bit of discussion on who/where/what/when for the GStreamer team. My plan is to take this document togheter with additons/corrections and other feedback I get and use it to replace the current non-functional gstreamer dotplan page. I also CC this to the GNOME desktop-devel list as they probably are interested to see how we are doing in regards to the upcomming GNOME 2.2 release. GStreamer Core Pretty stable currently. Wim Taymans(wtay) told me he felt we probably where API stable at this point. All changes he wanted to do at this point in time would not change the API. Only important change pending is Ronald Bultje(BBB)'s patch on the state handling needed for his v4l2 element. There are still many little snags that needs polishing, but Thomas Vander Stichele(thomasvs) is hard at work polishing, hopefully Wim Taymans will also join this effort upon his return from vacation. One major issue is that when caps-negotation fails to find matching caps it just continue trying infinitly. Gst-Editor The editor seems to have been one of the great hits during thomasvs presentation at the Boston GNOME summit. Andy Wingo(wingo) is still working hard on this one and the first release can be expected shortly. Almost all crasher bugs are gone, the known ones remaining are caused by bugs in some of the plugins. Biggest sinner here is the gnome-vfs plugin currently (any chance you get to do the planned rewrite of it Bastien?) Rhythmbox Jorn Baayen(jorn) is back from his vacation and is hard at work trying to stabilize the application in preparation for GNOME 2.2. Things are starting to look really good. One major bug atm is performance with large song collections, Jorn would probably appreciate some help with this. Dennis Smit is working on adding visualtization support to RB. Gst-player Working quite stably atm. Stebe Baker's(sbaker) immediate plans are to add support for metadata to it. Other issues are a playlist and maybe some better error handling when gstreamer fails to play a media file. Gst-rec Our video recording application. The development of this application has been on hold for some time while Ronald Bultje(BBB) has focused on the new v4l2 plugin. This plugin is mostly done now only waiting for Wim to approve the needed changes to the core (which will be in about 14 days when Wim returns from vacation.) Ronald plans to continue on Gst-rec now that the new plugin is done. Mozstreamer David Schleef(ds) have been coding like a madman lately and created a flash library including a gstreamer flash plugin. Hopefully this code will get commited to gstreamer CVS soon. David also plans on hacking on mozstreamer (or maybe some other plugin code?) in order to give us a browser plugin that can do everything with embeded media that windows users are so used to. Rtp plugin Zeeshan Ali(zeenix) is still working on the rewrite of the RTP plugin and moving it to the oRTP library. The effort is currently waiting for a response to a mail sent to Simon Morlat (author of oRTP) about some issues Zeeshan have. Non-Linear Editor Wim Taymans(wtay) is currently focusing his effort on the gnonlin library. Knowing Wim it will not be long before we have something for people to see here, but it will even with Wim at the helm still probably be some time before we have a fullfeatured editor availble. License Audit I have been trying to get many of the libraries we depend on relicensed from the GPL to the LGPL. Apart from the positive reponse from the Effectv people I have had little success so far. Problem has actually not been people saying no, but people being hard/impossible to reach with their email addresses just bouncing my mail. One of the positive reponses I got a some time ago was from ffmpeg author Fabrice Bellard who where willing to let us use the libavcodec part under the LGPL. Question is if this is enough? If we want to use the ffmpeg code for avi and asf decoding/encoding I guess I need to ask if he would be willing to let us use that. Not that switching to ffmpeg for avi would give us a more restrictive license that avifile as avifile is also GPL. Professional Audio Thanks to Andy Wingo we now have working and well functioning support for both the ALSA sound architecture and the Jack audio server. Coupled with the continued genereal improvements in the core we should now be at a place where gstreamer is starting to look very good as a foundation for people wanting to do professional audio applications. Andy and Leif Johnson's beatbox application will also hopefully serve as a proof of concept towards this group of developers. Utility library for GNOME In regards to the upcomming GNOME 2.2 release and how GStreamer will integrate there was some talk at the summit on the need for a small utility library for people just needing basic audio support for their application. monkey-media is a candidate here and Jorn have already made patches for the different components in GNOME2 to move then to using monkey-media. Some questions are raised to wether maybe monkey-media is overkill for the task, but for the time being it is what we have. MAS support Leon and Mike presented MAS to use at the Boston summit. MAS is for those who don't know it a crossplattform mediaserver (http://www.mediaapplicationserver.net). Creating a plugin for this has been on the GStreamer agenda for some time, but there still hasn't been an official release of MAS and the MAS CVS don't seem to get synced very often. The priority of this tasks depends a lot on wether the GNOME community and/or the important GNOME system integrators like Red Hat, Sun, Mandrake and Ximian plans on utilizing this soundserver anytime soon. KDE-interoperability We are quite strong here now thanks to Tim Jansen(tjansen) who recently provided us with Qt/C++ bindings. Coupled with our longtime support for the arts soundserver I think we are getting to a point where we have a pretty good case. ** Outstanding issues ** DVD playback People are successfully playing back vob files from the DVD currently, but that does not qualify as having good DVD support. Hopefully David I. Lehn(taaz) and Billy Biggs(vektor) can be talked into starting on a real DVD player for GStreamer (probably basing it on the gst-player code?) Media formats We currently support a very large number of media formats, but we still lack support for some of the more important ones like asf, wmf and realvideo. Our Quicktime support would also become much better if we could include the sorenson-compatible codec now bundled with Xine. There is lots of code available out there for use to use as a starting point for adding plugins for these formats, question is which code to use and a factor here should maybe be what chance we have to get to use that code under the LGPL. I will in addition to contacting ffmpeg also contact the xine people to see what their willingness to use their stuff under the LGPL is. Any suggestions for other sources to check with in order to get access to LGPL code please let me know. Short term I think getting asf support is the most important task, and as David Schleef gets our browser plugin up and running maybe having wmf/real support will become more important if we want to transparantly support webradio etc. Output plugins Our most glaring holes in the area of output plugins is output plugins for Sun and HP-UX audio. Since GNOME will be the desktop on these systems we really need to have native output on these plattforms. Problem here is that none of the current developers use the operating systems so motivation to create them has been low. Hopefully as more and more apps for GStreamer becomes useable people will appear using these systems who will help us create output plugins for those plattforms. Irix audio support would also be nice. |