My quest for a Linux audio player (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

My quest for a Linux audio player (Linux.com)

Posted Apr 5, 2006 13:39 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
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)

That article is horribly oversimplified. He talked about "buffers of video data" all over the place. Just what is a buffer of video data? Is it an uncompressed RGB frame, ready to be blitted? Maybe scaled and filtered YUV 4:4:4? Maybe pre-scaled YUV 4:2:2? Maybe macroblocks, maybe pre-mc, maybe a muxed PES, h.264, ... All of these are different ways of representing the same basic video.

And all representations are necessary. Most video cards can do a YUV->RGB conversion while scaling, filtering and blitting. A number of video cards can do basic macroblock transforms. The Via C3 does motion compensation in hardware. The IVTV chips can decode a single MPEG stream. Sure, in an ideal world, we'd have a single video format that everyone could buffer. Until then, DAGs and processing pipelines are pretty much necessary. How else are you going to solve this problem?

That said, GStreamer could be a hell of a lot better with its error reporting. Most people here have probably seen Totem's: "Error! Video could not be played because: no error."

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My quest for a Linux audio player (Linux.com)

Posted Apr 5, 2006 18:01 UTC (Wed) by thomasvs (guest, #36955) [Link]

wrt: That said, GStreamer could be a hell of a lot better with its error reporting. Most people here have probably seen Totem's: "Error! Video could not be played because: no error."

First of all, there has never been *any* dialog that has said this. You're probably over-simplifying for comic effect.

Second, the person who was maintaining the backend in the past repeatedly was told exactly what sort of things needed to be caught and displayed correctly. All the facilities were there in GStreamer, they were just being ignored by the implementer. This has since been fixed by other people. This is an application bug - without any changes to GStreamer Totem now shows decent error messages.