Re: Proposal: swfdec-gnome

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

Hey Benjamin.

On Tue, 2007-10-23 at 10:29 +0000, Benjamin Otte wrote:
> Peter Gordon <peter <at> thecodergeek.com> writes:
> 
> > Unfortunately, swfdec's dependency on ffmpeg/libmad for multimedia
> > decoding means that it cannot intrinsically be part of some distributions
> > such as Fedora without being hosted in a third-party repository of some
> > sort; and the current Gstreamer stack in swfdec does not work nearly as
> > well as does ffpmeg/libmad. For one, YouTube videos (from my very brief
> > testing with 0.5.3) play without sound and often freeze the X session
> > entirely. :(
> > 
> > Would this mean that its Gstreamer support would be heavily improved
> > or perhaps even become the main playback focus for videos? That would be
> > *awesome*. :)
> >
> The current GStreamer has some serious issues with the way Swfdec wants to use
> it. I'll gladly go into details about why, but I guess this is the wrong place
> to discuss this. The solution the GStreamer guys did for this was
> appsrc/appsink, however there's no release yet which uses it, and it looks like
> the next release will not have it either.
> 
> So in short: Yes, we'd like to improve GStreamer decoding options, but it's just
> not possible.

I think that using GStreamer for playback would be a must for swfdec to
be accepted as a blessed dependency (and thus swfdec-gnome added to the
desktop). We've been through not allowing other playback engines in the
past, so I don't think we can let swfdec change that position.

I hope you can work with the GStreamer guys to get the technical
problems sorted out. Having bugs filed or discussions started on
mailing-lists about the problems you've seen would also help the
community see that efforts are being made in that direction.

Cheers