Re: Gnome Media Library

[Lauris Kaplinski <lauris ariman ee>]

On Wed, 22 Mar 2000, Mo McKinlay wrote:

> 
> # The first thing that SHOULD be done, is to settle or implement standard
> # file loading libraries for video and audio, like gdk-pixbuf is de facto
> # standard for images. It is extremely inconvenient, if every simple program
> # requires different kind of libraries simply for loading .mod tunes.
> 
> You might want to briefly skim over the way BeOS does things - a lot of
> its APIs are centered around A/V file handling and it has a very nice
> pluggable architecture. Perhaps there's some things in there that GNOME
> can learn from?
> 
> For example, there's a generic utility (its name escapes me) which
> converts from one digital media file format to another - say, for example,
> QuickTime movie to Intel Indeo-compressed AVI. The utility itself knows
> nothing about the various formats involved; it just knows how to
> read/write "multimedia" files. The libraries do the actual dirty work, and
> the capabilities (formats supported, codecs, etc), are all not a whole lot
> more than plug-ins.

In a thread about image saving in gdk-pixbuf there was (as much as
I remember) the final consensus, that implementing universal saving
interface is not a good thing. Every file format simply has a bit too much
and too different adjustable parameters. Universal writing interface would
probably ignore most of them, thus generating less-than-optimal quality
files.

Or am I missed something?

L.