Re: GStreamer regression analysis [was: GNOME and GStreamer]

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas apestaart org>]

Hi Elijah,


> I think Thomas mentioned this too in this thread.  You two are
> probably right and have a better memory than me, so I went off to find
> it.  I had a hard time, though, could you point me to it in the
> archives?  What I found was
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-team/2005-August/msg00286.html,
> which is similar but comes across differently than what you two are
> saying now.

I'm not sure it was ever put to mail that way, though it certainly was
discussed on IRC and such.

The discussion ended at
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-team/2005-August/msg00321.html

To sum up that last part of that thread, it says:
- Ronald would like GNOME 2.12 to ship with 0.8.11 plugins, so that the
"promised" DVD support is actually up to snuff
- He also mentions that given that he's going to the US, and will not
have a DVD drive, he won't be able to do any coding related to DVD's
after that release
- So maintenance on it would have to be taken up by the GStreamer
community/Fluendo.  (I'm not really sure why Ronald there said Fluendo -
obviously Fluendo as a company cannot directly work on DVD support,
given that we've always made it clear we're working on a for-sale closed
implementation of a DVD player.)

I'm pretty sure nobody volunteered to maintain Ronald's DVD
implementation, and if memory serves me right some people from the
release team were told.  But even if there's no record of that fact, I
would say it's implied given the thread on this you're linking from.

Sigh, this particular DVD topic is a tough nut to crack.  I wouldn't
call the 0.8 version of it stable - I have some bugs opened against me
as a livna (Fedora "questionable" repository) maintainer on the DVD
stuff that I don't know how to fix.  Certainly Martin Soto's "seamless"
DVD player works a whole lot better.  And in reality, the fact that some
GStreamer hackers are employed by Fluendo to work on a DVD player makes
them unable to hack on the "wink wink nudge nudge" version of support
for it.  Martin Soto has implemented his DVD player with a state machine
written in python completely.  The only person I may see hacking on the
open-but-not-free version of DVD is Tim, for his thoggen application.

I don't see anyone else out there currently who would take on the task
of porting and polishing Ronald's DVD work. So I would say that if GNOME
thinks DVD support from inside totem is a blocker issue, I suggest you
stick to GStreamer 0.8.  And realistically speaking, if GNOME is not
targetting anything more than the home user market that has no problems
with enabling various add-on repositories of questionable code, then
this route will maybe work out better, modulo the random unfixable
crashes.

That only leaves me with the sour taste in my mouth of a Free Software
project bending over and taking it from behind from the non-free-content
providers.  Now excuse me while I go home and watch a movie on my
PlayStation :)

Thomas


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