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The Full Story on GStreamer

Posted by michael on from the one-api-to-bind-them-all dept.

JigSaw writes "Gnome's Christian Schaller has written an intro/status document on GStreamer, the next generation multimedia development framework for Unix. Christian explains what it is, why it is important, its use in both the desktop and server side, its use on embedded Linux, Gnome and even KDE. He also discusses its current competition and the plans for the future."

5 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. 100% CPU Usage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting
    My experience with GStreamer on RedHat v9 with Gnome has got me annoyed. Nautilus uses GStreamer to make the thumbnails and when browsing directories I'll often see GKrellM screaming about 100% CPU usage. A quick 'top' almost always reveals the culprit as gst-thumbnail.

    One of my terminal windows looks this:
    killall gst-thumbnail
    killall gst-thumbnail
    killall gst-thumbnail
    killall gst-thumbnail
    killall gst-thumbnail

    KDE has a runaway process killer. Why doesnt gnome?

  2. Nice. by Bluesman · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This really has come a long way from when I checked it out a while back.

    It's a fantastic idea, although it's been around for a while. But being able to apply different filters to an audio stream is really cool. It's unix pipes for audio.

    What would be great is if gnome standardized a bunch of filters like this for everything. Imagine being able to apply a tar and then a gzip filter in this manner. Or perhaps a .doc decode filter and a grep, then to a .csv. All file conversion could be handled by the environment, rather than individual programs, which is messy and inconsistent.

    Gstreamer is a big step in the right direction. Way to go guys.

    --
    If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
  3. GSteamer and MPLayer by JarekC · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Recently I read a short but interesting discussion of GStreamer in context of MPlayer, triggered by an announcement of a bonobo component wrapping MPlayer.

    I wonder what will happen when MPlayerG2 comes out from an incubator. Will the two projects simply compete, or will they work out some way to integrate/support each other?

  4. Re:Hmm... by CoolVibe · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Ever saw artsbuilder? Arts (despised and misunderstood by many) also is more than meets the eye.

    You can plug in modules, and synthesise any sound you like though plugins and modules, not unlike the pipeline editor in gstreamer.

  5. GStreamer summarized by Jeffrey+Baker · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I think gstreamer is a cute hack, but it is also *exactly* what Chris Pirazzi warned against in his "Video I/O on Linux: Lessons Learned from SGI".
    One can build fancy mechanisms which have network transparency, compression/decompression, format conversion, graph-based dataflow management, etc. on top of a well-designed video I/O API, and such mechanisms might be useful for some applications. But SGI's big mistake--one which hampered development of useful audio/video applications for years--was to try to build and offer those fancier mechanisms to developers instead of offering a simple API that worked on multiple video devices.

    Substitute audio for video when necessary.