Problems with GStreamer [LWN.net]

Problems with GStreamer

Posted Apr 5, 2006 11:03 UTC (Wed) by Uraeus (subscriber, #33755)
In reply to: My quest for a Linux audio player (Linux.com) by jwb
Parent article: My quest for a Linux audio player (Linux.com)

Heh, its always fun when people pull out that article by Chris Pirazzi about the lessons learned from SGI as it was something Chris wrote on my request as I was a writer/editor on linuxpower back in those days. I requested the article so that we could get some interesting viewpoint/input into the development of GStreamer at the time.

I think both he and you misses some important points. Part of the problem experienced by SGI was caused by developing a closed source library. Which meant that when application developers needed to add or change stuff at that level they where basically shut out and away from their data. With an open source project like GStreamer this isn't the case. If you need stuff at the GStreamer level you add it at the GStreamer level, not the application level.

So instead of trying to hack this into each of these 3 players you should have tried adding it to GStreamer. There already is a musicbrainz plugin and I am guessing a MusicIP plugin would be very similar. Once you had that added to GStreamer you could have easily gotten it to work in your application of choice, with the added bonus that the other two players (and many more) could also easily add the functionality too.

Your complaints about the error handling might be interesting and I am sure Thomas who have been working a lot on the error handling in GStreamer would be interested in your feedback.

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