GStreamer: Past, present, and future

Posted Oct 29, 2010 13:19 UTC (Fri) by wookey (guest, #5501)
In reply to: GStreamer: Past, present, and future by wahern
Parent article: GStreamer: Past, present, and future

Right. I have never understood why each different media player supports a different subset of stuff. As a naive geek who knows very little about multimedia it seems to me that once I have libx264 and libogg and libquicktime installed then every media player I have should be able to support those formats. But clearly that's not the case and there must be something else going on. Do I understand from what you say that VLC, mplayer totem etc don't actually use the same codec libraries but each implement their own? But if that's true what _does_ use these libraries (I see them on my system).

There seem to be complex interactions between players, lower-level media frameworks and individual codec libraries that I clearly don't understand. Can someone explain (or point to docs that explain)?

GStreamer: Past, present, and future

Posted Oct 29, 2010 22:21 UTC (Fri) by Uraeus (guest, #33755) [Link]

I assume that when you say stuff you mean media files. Well the reason is that a media file is a collection of things. For instance most media frameworks and players do their own demuxers (as using library versions makes things like trick modes hard to do) and the demuxer is more often than the decoder the one which has to battle with weird files. The second differentation factor is crash policy. The more broken files your player tries to play, the easier it is for said player to encounter something that makes it crash. This is a security risk. So as a player developer one are made to make a decision on how strict to be with more strict meaning less crashes but also less files being playable.