Richard:
I think gaim 2.0beta_whatever (maybe from blastwave) uses GStreamer, but I never got it to work (although ISTR some email archives in which that was a known problem not fully resolved). I ended up using NAS (can't remember where I got that) and the associated auplay command, since that had less latency than audioplay (and no start/end pops), and less pauses and such than whatever JDS/GNOME would prefer one used as an audio server (esd?).
GStreamer seems to slowly becoming the standard for audio/video in the GNOME desktop. The esd (Enlightened Sound Daemon) project is pretty dead at the moment (and currently maintained by a GStreamer developer, by the way). Remember that NAS, JACK, ALSA, and other popular audio frameworks are Linux specific and would require significant porting effort to get working in Solaris.
I would suppose that if someone plans to make some money selling licensed codecs (at a price that I would hope could drop substantially if they get enough volume!), it must be _possible_ to have GStreamer work decently, in which case some attention may be needed to make sure that it does, out of the box, on Solaris and with apps that use GStreamer (assuming use of the Sun supplied libs and not alternatives not under their control, like blastwave's, although it would be nice if those worked properly too, assuming that the problem is even there, which it might not be).
Since Nevada build 55, GStreamer seems to be working very well on Solaris. I don't notice any latency problems and the performance seems reasonable to me. I'm sure there are areas for further improvements and performance tunings, but the quality seems decent to me. If you haven't evaluated the latest Nevada builds, I'd recommend doing so before discounting GStreamer. I know that in earlier Nevada builds there were performance issues with GStreamer, and GStreamer is fairly unimpressive as shipped in Solaris 10. It took us quite a lot of work to work out the kinks, but the SunAudio GStreamer plugin is now working really well (since gst-plugins-good 0.10.5 was released).
I know there's lots I don't understand about it, but the whole audio scene on JDS/GNOME looks kind of ugly to me. It would be really nice to have a single audio framework that Just Worked with all the apps.
That will, unfortunately, probably never happen. Different media players have different capabilities, licensing situations, etc. For example, the RealPlayer/HelixEngine is an alternative that will remain an alternative on Solaris. One advantage of GStreamer is that it supports playback, recording, and media conversion (including CD ripping) while Real/Helix only supports playback out-of-the-box. You have to buy other products from Helix for recording and media conversion. Also, even though Java Media Framework seems a bit out-of-favor since nobody seems to be writing media applications in Java, there is always the possibility that JMF will come back to life someday. Perhaps JMF could bridge with GStreamer and/or Helix so it could use codecs that work with those frameworks. That might breathe some new life into media in the Java platform. Since Sun loves Java, my guess is JMF won't just disappear. Brian _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
