[maemo-developers] Python and GStreamer

[From: Jesse Guardiani]

Tony Maro wrote:
> 
> On 8/27/07, *Leonardo Sobral Cunha* <sobral at gmail.com
> <mailto:sobral at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     hi tony,
> 
>     there is a bug in your code, you dont need to call createGSTPlayer in
>     the start method, so you will reuse the pipeline that is already
>     created in the constructor (__init__).
> 
> 
> Interesting - every implementation I've looked at appears to recreate
> the pipeline for every song instead of reusing the old one.  I'll give
> that a shot and see what happens.  Let me qualify that statement: The
> two similar implementations I've looked at both seemed to do that.
> 
> I guess what's most frustrating is it happens randomly, one out of every
> 20 to 50 executions of the program.  It's not every time.  Kind of makes
> it hard to track down specifics.


gstreamer is poo. plain and simple. Yes, you need to recreate the
pipeline. If you don't, bad things happen, like hanging and such after
EOS. And no, EOS detection still doesn't work well in that class despite
my many tries. We abandoned gstreamer support in Kagu for a reason. It's
poo. It's much easier to just use OSSO Media Server via dbus and let
*it* deal with gstreamer for us.

Just the opinion of a developer who hung out on the #gstreamer IRC
channel while writing gstplayer.py and saw every suggestion by the folks
on that channel go up in smoke under one condition or another until the
API was so riddled with inconsistencies that it was a smoking pile of
garbage.

And no, before you ask, I don't think it's not Nokia's fault. gstreamer
is just unexpectedly buggy. Too bad ALSA doesn't support inline mp3
decoders... life would be easier for all of us...


-- 
Jesse Guardiani
Programmer/Sys Admin
jesse at guardiani.us