Thanks to the heroic efforts of our GStreamer developer, we’re bringing partial GStreamer support into Songbird far ahead of schedule. Those of you on Windows and Mac (i686 only) will now be using GStreamer to play back your FLAC files. This change is purely under the hood, so we don’t expect you to notice anything more than a smoother FLAC playback experience.
We also have a little secret about the GStreamer integration in our next release — it’s fully integrated for all supported file types. We’ve turned it off by default to give our community a chance to tinker with it for a little while before pushing it out fully (it will take one more release before we’re ready to fully switch over to GStreamer as our media core). If you want to be one of our bleeding-edge, 100% GStreamer mavericks, you’ll need to set one environment variable. There’s more info on that here.
Grab your GStreamer-enabled nightly build here (all standard caveats about nightly builds still apply). As always, we love to hear your feedback. Please let us know how GStreamer works out for you!
UPDATE (7/24/08): There’s a new add-on that will tell you which media core Songbird is using. Grab it here: http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addons/1271. You’ll get a new item in your Tools menu titled “Show Current Core”. Thanks to MikeS for whipping this one up!
16 Comments
SubscribeI know I’m part of the team and a bit biased but I can take no credit for this work and I just gotta say, this is a huge milestone for Songbird. Congrats to Mike and the rest of the engineering and QA teams! I’m so excited about what this means for the product.
How can I check if I got it configured properly for all of my media, Win XP BTW.
This is really a great news. I am not sure how this source code is arranged but i am finding it very difficult to build from source. So many dependencies and thirdparty libraries (especially for GStreamer). I am on Fedora 9. Does new publicsvn comes will major dependencies for GStreamer bundled with it. ?
This may be a really noob question, but how do I set the environment variable in OS X for Songbird in order to be able to use GST globally?
@koppah: No worries, I should’ve mentioned that in the wiki. You’ll need to pop open a terminal window and type this command:
SB_GST_ENABLE=all
You’ll then need to launch Songbird from the command line by running this command:
/Applications/Songbird.app/Contents/MacOS/songbird
@Ian: If FLAC playback doesn’t stutter, you’re golden.
@Jigar Shah: We did embed our own GStreamer build in the Linux nightlies! You’ll need to set an environment variable to turn them on. (Note: this only applies for Linux!)
SB_GST_BUNDLED=true
Thanks for the good questions, everyone. I’ll update the wiki page with some more information.
Thanks
I thought that it was to do it, but I wasn’t sure. Why is it not done via about:config? Is this because it needs to be done before the application starts?
@koppah: Because?
I think we did it this way because it’s just how we did it. about:config would also have been a good way to solve the problem.
Love your work guys.
I’d love to see a post about what this move will mean for the product and the end user. better quality? Lower CPU usage? More supported formats?
@Cris: GStreamer is going to help Songbird become the really robust, full-featured media player that we want it to be. It will allow us to build all sorts of features, such as gapless playback, visualizations, transcoding, and CD ripping. We don’t know exactly when we’ll get those features implemented, but it’s all on the horizon. We’re looking forward to getting started on it!
Nothing substantive to add, except that I’m very excited about this development. Songbird really seems to be hitting its stride now.
@boffo
thanks for the kind words, as i said before i’m totally biased but i couldn’t agree with you more on this one!
@Ian: We now have an add-on available to tell you which media core you’re using. Check out the link in the “updated” section on this post.
I had a technical question for the songbird developers, which I hope is OK to ask here.
I’m writing a radio application that I was wondering could use the dshow gstreamer source that I believe exists because the songbird folks have done that work for the gstreamer project.
This application needs to get at capture devices on windows. These devices are TV Tuner PCI/USB that also have a FM tuner. The application is in Java and I would need to use gstreamer-java. This is all simple to do on Linux as v4l/v4l2 is simple and directshow is hard
Of course since I don’t use windows let alone develop on it, I’m biased.
Thanks in advance to any help or advice.
Doug
Doug: we actually had nothing to do with the directshow gstreamer source (we did things with the directshow decoder wrappers, and a directshow video sink). We also don’t know much about gstreamer-java (the same goes for the rest of the gstreamer developers too - I don’t think gstreamer-java gets a lot of love).
You should probably ask questions on the gst-devel mailing list - hopefully someone there will know a bit more.
Thanks for the info msmith.