Linux for Video Production (O'ReillyNet) [LWN.net]

Linux for Video Production (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Aug 20, 2005 8:05 UTC (Sat) by cantsin (subscriber, #4420)
In reply to: Linux for Video Production (O'ReillyNet) by drag
Parent article: Linux for Video Production (O'ReillyNet)

I see and understand you point. But since video editing is a realtime task, only the trivial parts - i.e. only the GUI - of the application could be coded in Python. One should consider that Cinelerra, a program written in C++, recommends the use of Dual Opterons in connection with a 16-node cluster to do realtime compositing and editing. It seems highly speculative on behalf of the programmer to expect that those critical parts of the program will be simply provided by gstreamer (a framework that at the moment isn't even mature for multimedia playback) and a number of plugins, and that the realtime arbitration between them and gstreamer will be handled by the Python frontend. It might be feasible at the moment to writer a multimedia player frontend in Python using libxine/mplayer/gstreamer as backend at this moment, but I don't see video editing being feasible this way.

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Linux for Video Production (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Aug 20, 2005 11:57 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Well I agree with you entirely.

All of it rests on the shoulders of gstreamer framework.

Be aware that the framework was designed for this sort of thing from the beginning more or less.. It's not intended just for playback but for the specific ability to pipe data between plugins/whatever... Use filters, transcoders and codecs like Bash uses grep, sed, and awk.

The python, I expect is just for "glue" to allow a easy way for end users to start, stop, and connect gstreamer's various parts together in a convient manner. I doubt that python will handle the data in any serious way... Maybe for small specialized tasks and such.

Other examples of people using python in programs would be stuff like Panda3d. (which is open source) It's used in a few commercial games and is designed specificly to work with python. There is a python scripting framework for Blender (which itself is increadably powerfull and fast) that people are using to do some very advanced things, like modelling based on bitmaps or whatnot while also making it easier for normal people to write stuff like import and export scripts. And of course script-foo for the Gimp and such.

Also don't forget that Google uses Python in their stuff, and Zope is used on some very busy commercial sites.

But for this paticular thing to succeed it all depends on gstreamer. They could of just as easily used Mono and .NET or Java instead of python for all that matters. (although obviously I like python a lot)