[maemo-developers] Python and GStreamer

[From: Stefan Kost]

Hi,
Jesse Guardiani wrote:
> 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.
That is not wise. Its not a public API. It will change and maybe disappear. 2nd
I wouldn't conclude in the quality of gstreamer from how it behaves on the
device. Non working EOS detections could also be a bug in the dsp sinks, which
are not under quality control of the open-source project.

> 
> 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...
> 
Now you've lost me. I don't think GStreamer is that buggy. Unfortunately the
GSTreamer in the current SDK is not exactly new. Second you want a mp3 decoder
for ALSA? Imho that is not a good idea either.

My recommandation. Nail down bugs to reproducable testcases and file bugs. Is a
good idea to post bug-number here as a reminder.

Stefan