Alfred: >> Is it possible to configure coherence audio encoding to use a free >> format that is supported on Solaris, such as ogg-vorbis. This might >> not be useful for all users, but I'd think that coherence should provide >> the option to encode audio in a free format. > Just got the response from Coherence author. The MP3 encoding part is > only needed for XBox experiment and it's a quick hack. The coherence > community will "sort out the proper elements to use in advance > and enable/disable transcoding pipelines accordingly". As for > OpenSolaris, we can always disable the unsupported transcoding pipelines.
It sounds like features like MP3 support are experimental and mainly to support a different platform, Xbox. So, I think it makes sense to just not include such support on Solaris. The nice thing about using GStreamer is that it provides a framework where Sun can deliver all the free codecs, and users can get non-free codecs support from Fluendo. I would say most users would want to use coherence so that they can access popular media services via totem, rhythmbox and elisa plugins. Most such services use non-free media formats like MPEG-2, MPEG-4, so most users would need to get such plugins if they wanted access to these sorts of features. > The proposal to use the free ogg vorbis/theora format has been sent out. > As Mozilla community investigates big efforts on the open audio/video > which makes use of ogg format for its HTML5 audio/video tag support, the > ogg format is quite promising. It'll be good that coherence can support > this option. Thanks, I think it is important to encourage free projects to consider supporting free media alternatives. Seems that shouldn't require as much encouragement as it seems to. Since coherence uses GStreamer already, it would seem fairly trivial to make it work with alternative pipelines that would read/write data in any format the user could define a pipeline for. So I wouldn't think it should be a huge effort, unless perhaps supporting additional free codecs affects the UPnP specification as well as HTML5 video/tag support specification. > I'd suggest to follow up with the upstream GStreamer community when the > Coherence video transcoding is finalized. Will also keep the contact > with coherence community. We can always disable some of the features in > OpenSolaris if the gstreamer elements used aren't part of > gst-plugins-good(base). Any GStreamer plugin with distribution issues are kept in the gst-plugins-ugly module. Such plugins from this module are not distributed on Solaris. So we should not need to disable anything. Coherence features that depend on missing plugins just should not be available until the user installs the needed codec plugin. Brian
