[Bf-committers] GStreamer
neXyon
nexyon at gmail.com
Tue Aug 25 19:14:13 CEST 2009
Greetings!
Due to the latest discussion about ffmpeg also the question about
alternatives came up and such I got to know that there has been a
discussion about using GStreamer, but nobody can remember the exact
reason why we finally didn't use it, so I started investigating a bit if
we could use it.
The design of GStreamer is basically that you put so called elements
into a pipeline; example: filesource file.ogg -> oggdemuxer ->
vorbisdecoder -> audioconverter -> audioresampler -> alsaoutput. So
first I thought we have to write our own elements (which should be
easily possible with the plugin system), but in the #gstreamer channel
on IRC they told me that there are App* elements to let applications use
GStreamer without having to write such, so the integration should be
easily possible.
About losing functionality or not if we use gst instead of ffmpeg, I
found out that there is gst-ffmpeg, so if we include that with all
plattforms, we have no loss of supported codecs.
Moreover gst also supports QT and a hell lot of other libs (ogg,
DirectShow (Windows), ...), so I would propose to use ffmpeg and QT
through gst in case we decide to use gst, that would be a big advantage
for the video code in blender as we'd have to maintain less. For example
some ppl poked me about writing a backend for QT too for audaspace, if
we'd have a gst backend, we could drop the ffmpeg and sndfile backend
and I don't have to write the QT backend as we have all in one then via gst.
I then asked questions concerning the deployment. It's clear that it
should be possible to still have the blender zip run without the need of
installing dependencies and according to the ppl in #gstreamer thats not
a problem, it's even possible to link gst statically (they only told me
that we have to take care about GPL compatibility of the stuff we link).
The size of blender sholdn't grow to much too, as the core of gst is
pretty small. It depends on how many plugins we ship and gst-ffmpeg for
example shouldn't add to much, we currently ship the ffmpeg libs anyway.
Let the discussion begin!
Regards,
Jörg
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