Hi everyone, I have been lurking on this list for almost a month and a half now, and following the discussions with a lot of interest Recently, while going through http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/OpenMokoFramework, I noticed that there's almost no support for multimedia stuff like MP3 playback, etc. As far as I understand, libmokoui has some basic stuff which lets you play alarm tones/ring tones, etc, and since there is alsa-lib towards the base of the framework, one can theoritically use that to write one's audio player, and the same can be said about a video player, using xlibs, etc (though I read somewhere in the mailing list that probably the current hardware is not powerful enough to support video) In such a scenario, I guess the best way to go forward is to have multimedia support is to have Gstreamer[1] as a component of the framework. Openembedded already has gstreamer in their package repositories (Am I using the right term here ?), and Gstreamer already runs on ARM (Nokia 770/800), so probably adding gstreamer to the framework would not be a major issue. So, I was wondering, if this is a good idea for a SoC project. The deliveriables for the project would be, in short, as I see at the moment:
1. Porting and integration of the core Gstreamer lib to the OpenMoko framework 2. Identification of plugins to be included in the basic framework (will need to take into account performance issues, as well as legal/patent stuff) 3. Porting gst-python to OpenMoko (assuming that the Python framework is more or less ready at that stage) 4. If the timeframe allows, building of a media player on top of the framework, following the UI specs at http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Music_Player, to serve as a proof of concept, as well as example code, which other implementations can follow later on. Addition of Gstreamer to the framework would mean that, a) Writing applications like audio/video players, camera related stuff (if and when the hardware includes a camera) becomes much more easier. For example, the C code for a nicely implemented command line Ogg/Vorbis player looks like http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/doc/gstreamer/head/manual/html/chapter-helloworld.html#section-helloworld Code to get video from a webcam, adding a text overlay, encoding it to Ogg/Theora and sending it to a IceCast server looks like http://hippopotamus-streamer.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/hippo_streamer.c I remember implementing a command line tool to do video capture from a webcam, in under half an hour at Freedel.in 2006 (I was speaking on Gstreamer at that conference, and needed some example code) There are also tools like gst-launch to prototype your concepts quickly (here's a command which would add vertigo effects to a test video source and show it on screen: gst-launch videotestsrc ! vertigotv ! ffmpegcolorspace ! xvimagesink ) b) Since there is already very good bindings for gstreamer in Python, porting that to OpenMoko would be pretty easy once the rest of the Python stuff is in place. c) Most of the multimedia devs in the FOSS world (especially those working with GTK+/Maemo/GNOME) are familiar with Gstreamer nowadays, and it is being used in a large number of projects. So that would lower the "entry barrier" to OpenMoko developement (multimedia related) to a large extent. d) A number of companies like Fluendo is providing commercial gstreamer support and development, which is nice to have. ..now of course, I might be crazy, and all of the above stuff might not make any sense at all, and in that case feel free to flame me :-). If it does make sense, and if it sounds like a nice SoC project, I would love to hear your comments/suggestions, etc. And if anyone is wondering, I am a engineering student from India (and one of my favourite pastimes is to listen to MP3s in my Motorola A780). I have been playing around with multimedia and GTK+/GNOME related stuff for around three years (libxine, gstreamer, etc). I developed Senpai, a distant education tool with multimedia capabilities (http://www.l2c2.co.in/index.php?option=com_content&task=category§ionid=6&id=16&Itemid=30), and Hippopotamus Streamer, a tool to do live streaming from your webcam (http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings/hippopotamus/). I am currently involved with the Exaile Media Player project (www.exaile.org), and I'm currently implementing Equalizer support in Exaile (the basic code is in SVN - beta testers are welcome :-)). I am also involved with the Sabayon project (http://www.gnome.org/projects/sabayon/), and I am a member of the GNOME Foundation and a member of the national working group of FSF-India. I also do FOSS localisation, but I don't want to bore you to death :-). Warm regards, Sayamindu PS: The gstreamer developers are eager to help/co-mentor any SoC project which involves gstreamer, so we can look forward to their support if this eventually becomes a SoC project. [1] Gstreamer, in very simple terms, is a multimedia framework which lets the developer construct pipelines to process multimedia content. So for a mp3 player, the pipeline would look like filesrc -> mp3decoder -> alsasink Of course, there are higher level elements that can autodetect media formats and decode them automagically. -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]
