Re: GNOME Media Player draft

["Gene Ragan" <gzr eazel com>]

Cactus,

I think we all appreciate your work.  I would like to make an observation
though.

It is very common in the linux/unix world to create a media player using a
top down approach.  A lot of people have done
this and now we are blessed with a variety of incompatible media players
that have implemented large libraries of functions, codecs, format handlers,
etc. that do not work well outside of their application context.

What would be great is if the Gnome community could rally around creating an
extensible media framework.  I had been trying to work on GMF and have also
done some work on another framework as well that is exploring some ideas
seen as radical to the Gnome community like threads, etc.  If people don't
like GMF, that is fine.  But Gnome is in dire need of some sort of
framework.  We are light years behind the Mac and Windows.  Sound playback
and the way that ESD blocks the soundcard is a joke.  We need to make some
forward progress here.

I am not trying to be critical to you at all.  Instead I am trying to make a
call to action to everyone that cares about media support in Gnome.  It is
fun to define high level interfaces, but someone needs to do the heavy
lifting to actually define the infrastructure that these high level
interfaces use.  Going the route we are going now, we will have a media
player interface that is a hodge podge of processes and incompatible
libraries underneath.

Gene