“This article introduces you to GStreamer, a universal multimedia processing library that makes multimedia handling easy. GStreamer can answer many problems, such as ‘I need to store all audio samples coming from various sources in a common format’. Because all formats are treated alike, you only need to write one tool. This saves time and makes the solution more robust and easier to maintain. Moreover, after you learn the GStreamer concepts, there’s almost no limit to what you can apply it to.”
Since it’s sort of a library, you probably have to compile against it. Doesn’t that mean you need a recompile, of either GStreamer or/and the application, if you want to add support for codecs after install? This seem impractical, if I’m understanding it right.
AFAIU it, codecs are implemented as plugins to the library.
So when an app requests a plugin named “plugin3” in the gstreamer pipeline, the gstreamer library will go ahead and try to load the plugin “plugin3”. If it can, all goes well. If not, then an error is usually passed back to the user.
This means as long as the codec (plugin) is compiled against the same version of gstreamer that the application is compiled against, everything should be fine, no recompilation necessary.
gstreamer ROCKS!
Except that it’s still unusable as media playback backend…
I still need mplayer, xine and vlc to complement nautilus-gstreamer.
totem-gstreamer works for most everything I throw at it
xine is good stuff too
To my experience, gstreamer is quite good with open formats. It doesn’t handle patented, DRM or closed formats very well… but it’s not like it was completely unexpected.
Support for “ugly” formats will probably improve once the framework hits 1.0.
No, gstreamer does not rock. Right now, gstreamer is alpha software with a lot of potential, but it has a LONG way to go. On my Ubuntu machine, I tried gstreamer, but I went back to xine. Gstreamer isn’t ready for full time use yet (at least for me it isn’t).
Are those geeks getting *payed* to play around with open source progs? Tainted love!
Edited 2006-07-17 08:29
Slightly OT, though related to the coolness of GStreamer.
Marc-André Lureau has been working on a “smart desktop audio mixer” … i.e. per-application audio levels, controllable via a GUI of sorts. It works using a GStreamer sink, further information at his blog:
http://gsmartmix.blogspot.com/2006/07/mid-term-evaluation.html
I personally think GStreamer is a fantastic framework. It has matured incredibly over the last 6 months and provides a great basis for a lot of useful applications, powerful scripts etc.
“Marc-André Lureau has been working on a “smart desktop audio mixer” … i.e. per-application audio levels, controllable via a GUI of sorts.”
Interesting. ISTR reading Vista would have something like that too, so it’s good to see the Linux desktop keeping pace.
Ah, linky:
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=116347
…so the way I see it, if KDE 4 is going to use Phonon, is it a higher-level “layer” and gstreamer can still be used by, for instance, BMPx? Or am I seeing it wrong?
Yes Phonon is higher and would be able to use gstreamer as its backend. The real difference is that right now Phonon is a basic framework, not really powerful for ubber audio stuff. It’s basically there so that KDE apps with simple audio needs can target it and not have to worry about the fast development cycle of gstreamer
and at this rate it always will be.