http://live.gnome.org/Boston2006/GStreamer

[Stefan Kost <stefan kost nokia com>]

hi,

Below a personal short summary from the Boston Gnome Summit 2006:

During the main event I lead a series of gstreamer sessions. There we
discussed desktop specific things like the status of DVD playback.
Personally I worked on a binary registry feature
(http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=359653).
The idea is to not use XML for the registry cache, as the cache is not
supposed to be human readable, nor is there a need to transform it and
make in platform independent. Making it a binary blob, allows us to drop
libxml2 dependency.
It should also be quicker and use less memory.
This is work in progress, but here is a quick summary:
  65133 2006-10-12 11:04 /home/ensonic/.gstreamer-0.10/registry.i686.bin
 740429 2006-10-12 09:24 /home/ensonic/.gstreamer-0.10/registry.i686.xml
time gst-inspect >/dev/null
 xml-registry: real 0m0.246s  user 0m0.224s  sys 0m0.004s
 bin-registry: real 0m0.095s  user 0m0.056s  sys 0m0.004s

Another topic was the resource management behind GSmartMix
(http://live.gnome.org/GSmartMix). I demo'ed the current state of the
software and will forward feedback to the author. 

I also found some time to debug sunaudiosink performance problems with
Brian Cameron of OpenSolaris.

Finally it was interesting to talk to Alex Larson about the plans for
the new gnome-vfs. We have some problems with gnome-vfs in own plugins
(missing extended attributes) and with the async i/o handling in the
case of network errors (gnomevfssrc gstreamer element).

I am quite happy how everything went. There weren't too many people
interested in gstreamer hacking, although the amount of people was still
okay. For the next year I will announce the hacking session before the
event starts and put ideas online.
Badges would be good for the next time. This way its easier to figure
out who is who. It could be as easy as to have a template online that
people fill-out and print.

Stefan Kost