GStreamer as another media player core in XBMC?

I have never been satisfied how mplayer handles video playback on xbmc - i find it particulary slow (especially when parsing subtitles), it crashes often (especially when streaming from the net), doesnt support seeking in streaming videos and supports flv files VERY poorly.

Recently, the Devs of Songird (the Mozilla media player) decided to use the Gstreamer framework as their core for media playing.

Gstreamer plays all major media formats/codecs and has prooved to be very reliable. in addition to that it supports 100% MMS-streaming with seeking. It has also been alreay ported to Windows and OS-X.
And there are Python-Bindings available!

You may wonder (i dont btw) why Songbird devs didnt choose mplayer for that. Have a look at this blog entry.

Having a reliable media core build on GStreamer would also eliminate the need to have a seperate media core for dvd handling (dvdplayer) in XBMC (a concept i never really understood).

Whats your opinion on that?

We don't use mplayer.

jmarshall Wrote:We don't use mplayer.

i am sorry then - i must have misread this line in my debug log.

gstreamer pulls in too many dependencies

That may depend on the defenition of "too many dependendies".

If ones argue that the heart of xbmc lies in the ability to play the major media formats used these days in a faultless and reliable manner, then those are probably not too many dependencies.

But just having looked at the dependencies myself, i get your point.

Still, nothing undoable though - songbird devs may proove it.

regards

mplayer is only used on xbox, and porting gstreamer to it would not be much fun...

And yeah, the dependencies is the main problem, other than the fact that we have a functioning player or two already.

We ofcourse encourage any developer wishing to investigate using gstreamer - it's just unlikely to be one of our guys.

Cheers,
Jonathan

You could maybe be able to convince Team Boxee to implement it as media player core (in Boxee) because of this feature:

Quote:Support for monolithic plugins. Allows for a plugin to encapsulate many operations such as reading a file, decoding it and sending the output to a sound card. This is particularly useful for DRM implementations.

IIRC someone at Boxee mentioned that in the long term (future) they will be looking to also supporting DRM video/audio streams if it can be done via plugins without violating the GPL. If Boxee implements it then we can backport it to XBMC, or maybe they could even add it to XBMC directly themselves.

Thanks for you answers,

i didnt know that mplayer is only being used on xbox.

I will contact the boxee team about this then - thanks for the tip!

funkytown Wrote:i didnt know that mplayer is only being used on xbox.

For more information about XBMC different players see the XBMC Online Manual:
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Video_Players
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Audio_Players
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Basic_overvi...ource_code

I can offer a very good reason to support gstreamer:

http://www.fluendo.com/products.php?product=plugins

One thing that I think turns people away from trying Linux for HTPC, is the "scary" copyright/DRM issues that make the average person wonder whether or not they have the right to play something they legally own. M$ and @pple are what most people use, partially because they've already obtained and integrated licenses (for the most part anyway). The other issues, are simply (well, maybe not "simply") configuring and tuning systems - which you can leave to whomever is clever and imaginative enough to create a market - TiVO anyone?

Anyway, I'm not trying to preach too much about Linux, but I'm just saying that with companies like Fluendo, it could eventually eliminate FUD surrounding whether or not an end-user can legally play media they own with no/minimal fuss.

I understand GStreamer can be a pain, but it looks like a good supported standard, in an era of content-fascists.