The Full Story on GStreamer

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."

Comments

Hmm...

[My Secondary Account]

The "pipeline" he describes is somewhat similar to what you can do with VST plugins in Windows. E.G., you could hook up a microphone, then attach some distortion filters and eventually terminate the pipeline at some output device. All in all, this is a great article in my opinion. For the technically inclined, there are much more in-depth docs here, including all the gory API details.

Re:GSteamer and MPLayer

[IamTheRealMike]

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?

To be honest, the two don't really compete... mplayer is purely playback focussed. It has no pretensions as a multimedia framework, or anything of the sort. GStreamer is all about being a powerful multimedia framework.

It's easy to forget how much code sharing goes on between these projects. They are all liberally licensed, all import each others code all the time and swap codec implementations etc. This isn't like standard capitalist competition where people constantly reinvent the wheel in order to stay ahead - if mplayer has a codec the GStreamer guys want, licensing issues nonwithstanding they'll go and take it.

Re:One big bit of news

[Goonie]

I wouldn't get too excited about final-year student projects.

They are usually evaluated according to their adherence to software development methodologies, rather than the actual quality of the end product. To that end, students spend more time making the paperwork good rather than the code good. Whilst this is a necessary part of building really big projects, it's not an optimal method of building small projects by inexperienced part-timers who often have only a very partial understanding of the problem domain.