While the rest of the team has been busy fixing the remaining bugs for 0.5 and starting to move on to 0.6, Edward and I have been working on a branch hacking away at getting Songbird working with GStreamer on all three platforms. Edward has been working on getting GStreamer to build on all three platforms, fixing up the QuickTime and DirectShow wrappers, and generally cursing all bits from our friends in Redmond. I have been working on the Songbird side of things — modifying our build process to include GStreamer as part of the install as well as convincing each platform to load dynamic libraries from places they prefer not to (major chirps to bsmedberg and his stub loader). All of my work is in bug 8011.
We will probably merge the GStreamer branch back to the trunk once the dust from 0.5 settles so those playing along at home can create their own experimental gstreamer enabled builds.
Oh yea, pics or it didn’t happen!
Below is a screen shot of Songbird with GStreamer on OSX. It is currently playing an mp3 using the QuickTime codec wrapper’s MPEG Layer-3 audio decoder. You can see the GStreamer debug spew in the background as well as our “about:gstreamer” page that shows all of the audio decoders provided by the QuickTime wrapper.
And here is a screen shot of Songbird with GStreamer on Windows. It is playing an Ogg Vorbis file using our local copy of libvorbis. Also note the differences in the “about:gsteamer” page where you can see the audio and video decoders provided by the DirectShow codec wrapper plugin.
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[...] hacker Steve Krulewitz posted a blog entry yesterday outlining the progress made on using GStreamer for the Songbird music player and browser not only [...]
[...] thanks to the MacOSX and Windows the nice Windows and MacOSX support in GStreamer maybe this could become a cross platform solution for [...]
11 Comments
SubscribeYou guys are god!
Thanks for this wonderful product!
I am not sure but GStreamer has lots of issues recently. Its *-bad plugin required for MP3 is not working correctly. I have plenty of MP3s and almost 30% of them do not work …They show error. Are you guys going to help GStreamer to be mature enough to address these issues ?
What a great news!
When will you guys merge gstreamer branch back to the sub-version trunk? so i can download them and create my own gstreamer build ???
I’m glad to see, that the unification across platforms is progressing. It’s always a pain to explain different stories for the same piece of software to different people.
This is much welcomed.
This question may be getting old, but I’m still confused about the advantage of using GStreamer. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that audio in Linux is a complete MESS. It seems like every week there’s a new audio system being tauted as the “The One.” And honestly, I’m completely ignorant of how all these systems work for or against each other. Currently Ubuntu is in the process of adopting PulseAudio. Does that serve to support Songbird’s adoption of GStreamer, or is PulseAudio in opposition to Gstreamer? Also, can somebody (as briefly as possible) explain to me the advantage of using GStreamer over the existing VLC?
Gstreamer is at a level above pulseaudio, so they are not in competition.
@jinwoo - I think it should happen in the next week or so. CC yourself on this bug to be notified when it happens:
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=8345
@Matt - Sam is correct, a properly configured system will have gstreamer based applications (and all other applications) sending audio output to PulseAudio. This includes Songbird
hey, have you thought about moving the gstreamer work into xulrunner, joining forces with doublec, who is working on and backends right now. would be nice if by joining forces we could have excellent media support on the web and a great media player using the same foundations.
Hey. Just a few questions: does Gstreamer have any advantages for Songbird’s users (I’m not asking about your advantage — it’s obvious) over VLC? How will this affect download size / start-up time?
hey guys,
A couple of questions: are you compiling the plugins to decode video files as well, or only those required for audio playback?
And are you planning to release this gstreamer builds (for windows and OSX) as independent installable packages?
Thanks,
Andres