Re: First release of MAS available

[Guenter Bartsch <bartscgr web de>]

hallo christian,

> > thanks for clarifying this. as you might know i'm working on xine which
> > tries to stay as independant of desktops as possible (while integrating
> > with them where possible) and i think gnome has a reputation of
> > supporting non-gnome applications well so i guess it would be a nice
> > step if gnome would recommend running mas so non-gnome applications
> > still have a solid basis (if mas is solid, not sure yet) for audio
> > output
> 
> Well not sure you gain by extreme independence, there is some truth to
> the saying that if you try to please everyone you end up pleasing no
> one.

it is just about keeping dependancies to a minimum. xine is aiming to
become a general multimedia engine that wants to be portable and should
also run on machines that do not have any desktop environment installed
(e.g. set top boxes running in framebuffer mode) - just one of many
reasons.

> Anyway if GNOME says 'use MAS' or 'use GStreamer' shouldn't make a big
> difference for Xine I think. Making a xine plugin that outputs to
> GStreamer should be rather simple.

i guess i'll look into that. but of course a mas plugin would also help
on platforms that have mas but do not have gstreamer 

> Alternatly so could you just read the
> GStreamer GConf keys and make sure Xine uses the same output as
> GStreamer based apps under GNOME.

of course that would work but i guess it would be a bigger effort
(detect gnome, detect gnome libs and headers for compilation or copy the
headers and link dynamically at runtime etc) and cover fewer platforms.

cheers,

   guenter