On 3 Aug 2001, Seth Nickell wrote:
FWIW my personal view is that the whole sound thing in libgnome is
pointless, because no one turns sounds on, because we don't have any
good sounds. And sounds are annoying even if you have good ones, most
people don't them on in Windows either I don't think.
Having event sounds in libgnome is sort of a "whatever" issue compared
to picking and running with a media and/or sound API. aRTs is OK, but it
would seem prudent to eventually add a full media API to the mix (and I
presume gstreamer can use arts). "Playing movies" is currently one of
the surprisingly few things a GNOME desktop is completely incompetent at
that has become a basic part of commercial desktops.
Well, 'what is our multimedia strategy' is the wrong kind of discussion to
have 3 days after API freeze.
If we plan to release a GStreamer-based media player with GNOME as an
application for 2.0, it seems reasonable to include it in the official
libraries.
This doesn't follow. Gstreamer is really a media middleware, and not
including libgstreamer.so (or whatever it is called) in the libaries does
not really afftect the ability to ship it as either core program or a
fifth toe program. It has an audio output plugin for artsd.
OTOH - gstreamer is a large API, some of which is low level (and x86
specific), it has it's own APIs (and code) for configuration/propeties and
XML. Aka a mess.