[Bf-committers] Optional gstreamer support for video display

[Peter Schlaile]

Hi Luya,

I'm afraid, that's not a feasible solution for blender.

To support robust frame exact seeking, we have to do some creative stuff
with the ffmpeg API, which is to my knowledge not possible with
gstreamer, I'm afraid.

Suggestion: why don't you build a stripped down version of ffmpeg for
Fedora with all patented codecs removed and use that instead?

A lot of projects depend on ffmpeg (and libavcodec), so: removing it all
together seems a bit extreme to me...

Kind regards,
Peter


> Hello developers,
> 
> As a maintainer of Blender 3D for Fedora project, the ffmpeg support has
> to be disabled due to the policies related to patent issues (see
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Software_Patents) in the USA. The side
> effect is the video sequence editor cannot play any open source codecs
> such as webm and theora.
> 
> An alternative will be to include support for gstreamer
> (https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/) because of its plugin flexibility
> i.e. installing one for say mp4 is much easier.
> 
> Discussion welcome.
>