Re: My take on Totem and GStreamer

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

<quote who="Seth Nickell">

> Which is what most users are going to care about, as much as I think
> gstreamer is cool and awesome. Getting Xine to be shippable with distros
> sounds like a serious and potentially fatal hurdle

(Bastien has said that the Xine dudes are perfectly happy to split out the
patent-encumbered source into another module, so this should not be too
serious.)

> The nice thing about Totem is that if we ship Xine for 2.4, when we
> transition to Totem with gstreamer behind it for 2.6 nobody should notice
> (except hopefully that things are stronger, smarter, faster, better ;-)

Strongly agree.

> The only issue that I would be seriously concerned about is if shipping a
> Totem'd Xine will further hamper the surprisingly lethargic rate that
> gstreamer is acquiring plugins for "modern" video formats.

... and fully supporting error feedback, video/audio syncing, etc., etc.
This is the biggest reason why I'm iffy about shipping a xine-based Totem,
but we may end up having to consider it for 2.6 anyway.

And on my random commentary about Rhythmbox:

> > [1] Which, as it happens, I don't think should be in the desktop release
> > (I don't think music library management is a 'greatest common factor'
> > feature) but should be blessed in an official GNOME release of sorts.
> 
> Rhythmbox isn't "music library management" software, its a music player,
> which is pretty basic functionality at this point. I think music playing,
> video playing, and making presentations are the most desired "tasks" not
> yet handled by GNOME (though of course, we're still waiting on stable
> GNOME2 ports of some even more important software like Gnumeric and
> AbiWord, so perhaps its not fair to say that these are currently covered).

I guess my disagreement stems from 'greatest common factor' issues. Simple
media playing is useful for lots of different kinds of users, but music
playing and organising may not be. Consider a locked down corporate desktop
environment... I think that the stuff we put into the Desktop release should
minimally satisfy the greatest common factor of our users. "Accessories sold
separately." ;-) Thus, I'm not sure that a music player and organiser fully
fits in.

Totally random musings though, and good stuff to discuss over a beer at
GUADEC, I'm sure. ;-)

- Jeff

-- 
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