[gnome-love] GStreamer plans and TODO

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <Uraeus linuxrising org>]

Hi,
Hi 0.6.1 out there door I felt it was time to think aloud on what we
want to do in moving GStreamer and particularly the 0.6.x series
forward. I am sending this both to GStreamer-devel, but also to
gnome-multimedia and gnome-love since many of the integration tasks
should be rather good projects to get started on for people who hasn't
worked so much with GStreamer before.

This list will probably be converted into a updated TODO page on
gstreamer.net, so anyone who has any comments and additions be sure to
speak up.

So as mentioned this list is an attempt to put together the most
important pieces we need to get into GStreamer 0.6.x and GNOME 2.x
series for it to provide maximum service to the applications that people
use with it. This list is put together with the needs of these
applications in mind:
Gst-player and Totem
Sound Juicer
GNOME Media
Nautilus/Nautilus-Media
Rhythmbox,Net-rhythmbox, Lymric
Marlin

GStreamer plugins that needs fixing for gst-player/totem:
Make auparse work in gst-player
Make flxdec work in gst-player
Make Make swfdec work in gst-player
Make audiofile plugin work so it can provide aiff support to player, or
make an aiffparse plugin

Hook up ffmpeg decoders for WMA, Quicktime, Real and ASF

Make Owen complete his asf demuxer :)

We need a Quicktime demuxer, I suggest we drop the openquicktime stuff
and instead port the 
Quicktime demuxer from Xine. It is made by Mike Melanson, and Bastien
says it is very nice. Hopefully Mike will also let us re-license it
under the LGPL.

I tested playing some of the new Quicktime trailers using Xine the other
day, using the windows .dll files. It worked incredibly well. Although
we focus on codecs that works on all archs, ie have source code, it
could be a nice task for someone wants to get started hacking on
gstreamer to either write one or port one of the existing windows dll
loaders into a gstreamer plugin.

New plugins that would be nice for Soundjuicer, Sound-recorder and maybe
Marlin:
an au encoder
an aiff encoder

Fixes that would be nice for Rhythmbox and relatives
Ape metadata/tag collection
Flac metadata/tag collection
Writing of metadata using GStreamer
Make ape plugins work on PPC (non-Intel in general?) so it can be moved
into 0.6.x series

Fixes needed in Nautilus-media:
Better error handling of unsupported formats, for instance when people
try using it to play mp3's under RH9 they should get a more intelligent
message on why it can't.

Make nautilus-media not crash when pressing refresh.

nautilus-media should have some file management support, like deletion,
file rename etc.

Portabiliy issues:
Move to speciallib
Maybe make a libao plugin to get a sound output option with
autodetection and wider native platform support

GNOME 2.x and GStreamer integration opportunities:
Audio CD playback.
Moving the GNOME CD player and the cd player applet to using GStreamer
would be nice, make sure however to not cause a regression for Sun etc.
by this move.

Getting Nautilus to use GStreamer for the music preview would both give
a nice boost in supported formats and potentially solve a lot of bug
reports on Nautilus.

Make it possible to embed Beast/BSE into GStreamer pipelines. Probably a
rather big task, but it should be rewarding.

There are both a Mozilla plugin and a Nautilus view/Bonobo component of
the Gst-player, both needs love to actually work at a production level.

Maybe the sound server capplet in GNOME should be made to update the
gstreamer sound output gconf key. So when people choose to
activate/deactivate the sound server then GStreamer follows that. Do
give some audio/video sync issues however due to limitations in esd.
Could be that this should be postponed til after MAS or similar is in
place.

-------
http://www.gstreamer.net


-- 
Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <Uraeus linuxrising org>