Re: [GMG-Devel] GStreamer 1.0

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Boris Bobrov writes:

> Hello,
>
> Today I was happy to find out that my branch with GStreamer 1.x and 
> improvements to video and audio processing was merged to Mediagoblin master 
> branch! It means that it will be included in the next release, which will 
> happen in a couple of weeks.
>
> The features merged include:
>  - New GStreamer. Old GStreamer is many years old and not supported; no 
> codecs 
> were added there and it didn't work with Python 3;
>  - New thumbnail generator. It became more reliable and works always if the 
> uploaded video is supported;
>  - Early failure on unsupported videos. A lot of complaints were that videos 
> uploaded successfully but failed to be processed, without any information 
> why. 
> Now the possibility to process the video is determined right on upload and if 
> the video is not supported (due to missing packages, lack of codecs), error 
> message is printed about the failure and a more verbose message is logged as 
> warning;
>  - Multiple audio and video streams processing and video without audio 
> processing. Common usecase -- a film with audio for several languages or a 
> recording of the same event from multiple cameras;
>  - Tests of audio and video
>
> Please check out already updates docs about what to install for these 
> features:
> http://mediagoblin.readthedocs.org/en/latest/siteadmin/media-types.html#video
>
> I would appreciate bug reports or comments.
>
> *But* there is one tiny problem: not all distros support GStreamer 1.x. There 
> is Debian with a bug not letting to install all required packages from stable 
> and stable backports; Centos 6 doesn't have GStreamer 1.x; Arch on certain 
> configurations failes to install required packages.
>
> What is not yet decided is whether to make the new functionality the default 
> and remove support of GStreamer0.10, make it the default and leave 
> gstreamer0.10 support in "deprecation" state or leave GStreamer0.10 the 
> default and make GStreamer1.0 and all the improvements to be a new option.
>
> Supporting gstreamer0.10 might be good for users. It means that we don't push 
> users to install packages from repos outside their distros' releases.
>
> On the other hand, I think that every user of MediaGoblin with old video 
> plugin has ran into strange problems with transcoding or thumbnails. It is 
> also easy to run into the problems for a new user, who usually has his videos 
> encoded with some proprietary codec, that usually fails on old GStreamer. The 
> user tries uploading, gets weird error, gives up. 
>
> Now I tend towards the second option: Use GStreamer 1.0 by default and 
> provide 
> a way to fallback to 0.10. This option might have ugly implementation: a 
> script to fallback to 0.10 with sql tables renames and a script to revert the 
> fallback in some future when we drop 0.10 completely, again with sql tables 
> renames. It also looks error-prone to me.
>
> What do you think?

Thanks again Boris for all your hard work on this!  It's thrilling to
have it in master at last. :)

(I'll leave it up to others to decide the 0.10 thing ;)  But if the
feature is available by Monday, we can support both for 0.8.0!)

 - Chris