Comment on your latest article on GNOME-3.0

[Ronald Bultje <rbultje ronald bitfreak net>]

Dear Eugenia,

in your latest article on osnews.com, you mention that GNOME should switch
to ALSA fully. Your example is that GNOME Volume Control tells you to
create your OSS device nodes. This means you're still running GNOME 2.4,
because GNOME 2.6 is almost completely ALSA compatible. The mixer, for
example, will tell you that you don't have any GStreamer sound mixer
plugins installed if it cannot find them. If it can, it will show ALSA and
OSS mixers. Your error notice does not exist in GNOME-2.6.

Your point is not completely void, though. Things that *do* need doing as
of GNOME-2.6.1/GStreamer-0.8.1:
* smart way of determining output plugin (osssink/alsasink or any of the
sound server output plugins) and input plugin (osssrc/alsasrc) in
GStreamer. It currently requires manually setting them (using
gstreamer-properties, part of gnome-media), which is insane. End users
shouldn't be required to know what "ALSA" is, or that "GStreamer" contains
an "alsasink" "element" which they can use in "that Totem thing".
* ESD needs some smartification, including ALSA-awareness of some sort
(maybe through GStreamer?).

That's pretty much it. We (the GStreamer developers) have ideas on the
first item, and hope to implement those somewhere in the GStreamer-0.8
series (if time permits - that's always the hard thing in opensource
programming). The ESD thing is difficult, but there's been some discussion
on this topic on the gnome-multimedia mailinglist. We (the GNOME
multimedia community) hope to solve this in a binary-compatible way in
GNOME-2.x. If that appears impossible, it'll hopefully be fixed in
GNOME-3.0.

As for the other suggestions, some of them are great. Let's hope that some
of them can be realized, the sooner the better. I'll do anything in my
range to get Totem(-gst) in GNOME-2.x at some point.

Hope this helps and keep up those articles - they're great!

Ronald

(PS if you have any issues with media files not playing back on Totem-gst,
as you suggested, please file those on bugzilla. We encourage such bug
reports and are very much willing to help fixing those. The only thing we
need is a copy of the media file.)