Gstreamer and Arts

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mkone

Beginner

Posts: 1

Tuesday, September 30th 2003, 12:38am

Gstreamer and Arts

I am very much a multimedia person, I like my multimedia stuff. However, I think fragmentation in Linux multimedia is holding things back. I need to be educated too.

Historically, KDE used arts to provide multimedia capabilities for its desktop environment, whilst GNOME used esd. However, arts was more advanced than esd, which has remained to this day, a simple sound daemon. I have heard that arts is becoming more of a multimedia framework a la gstreamer, which brings me to the main point of my post.

Are there any technical reasons to choose arts over gstreamer. I have been doing a lot of reading about gstreamer, and it seems quite a well designed framework, with minimal dependencies. One bone of contention seems to be dependency on glib, which is written in C, which I understand to a point. How does arts compare on technological grounds alone, aside from the language of choice in writing this. Does anyone else feel, like I feel, that this split between the 2 major desktops will hurt Linux multimedia more than it helps by competition. Should 'desktop politics' become a part of this.

I like to liken the multimedia framework to something like the X server, or the kernel, with both projects should be able to support with no problems. Comments please?

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anda_skoa

Professional

Posts: 1,273

Location: Graz, Austria

Occupation: Software Developer

Tuesday, September 30th 2003, 10:02am

Re: Gstreamer and Arts

Quoted

Original von mkone

Are there any technical reasons to choose arts over gstreamer. I have been doing a lot of reading about gstreamer, and it seems quite a well designed framework, with minimal dependencies. One bone of contention seems to be dependency on glib, which is written in C, which I understand to a point.

Current arts CVS version requires glib as well.

One reason currently is that arts needs to be available for any coming KDE3 release (compatability).
It could be replaced in KDE4

There are several discussions about media frameworks on kde-multimedia http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-multimedia&r=1&w=2

As far as I remember, gstreamer cannot do the synthesising/effects arts can do, or it isn't network transparent.
There are several other options beside the two menioned, see for example
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-multimedia&m=104631456630436&w=2

Quoted

How does arts compare on technological grounds alone, aside from the language of choice in writing this. Does anyone else feel, like I feel, that this split between the 2 major desktops will hurt Linux multimedia more than it helps by competition. Should 'desktop politics' become a part of this.

There is some cooperation going on in that part as well.
I think the develoeprs try to be able to use each other as a backend and support common backends.

A difficulty, as far as I understand, is the different view on usage.
Some multimedia people need video capabilties, some want network transparency, some want input as well as output, some want synthesizing, ...

All contenders implement a subset of this topics and it seems difficult to extract the common grounds.

Cheers,
_

Qt/KDE Developer
Debian User

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