Re: the road to 1.0 and beyond

Guenter Bartsch wrote:
> hallo there,
> still one week to go with my diploma thesis, but i am beginning to
> wonder what xine's future looks like.
> - big, radical API cleanup
>    guenter

HI,

i am still dreaming about somebody extending one of the many working 
codec/plugin APIs to something more powerful, so that we finally have a 
new, opensource codec plugin to be used to standardize for all 
platforms, like UCI was planning to do once ( http://uci.sf.net ). 
Unfortunately the maker of UCI, a gentleman called Alex 'Foogod' 
Stewart, disappeared competely from the scene. I meanwhile do have admin 
rights for the project on sf.net, together with another guy, but we 
could very well either drop the project and create a

'Xine Codec API Project'

or try to rebuild/finish UCI starting from a powerful existing API such 
as a Xine or FFMPEG plugin API. We had thoughts to use the Gstreamer 
plugin API for that, but its hardly possible without having Gstreamer as 
complete framework underlying, so this is not an option.

In any case, this API should be desgined x-platform, so that codec 
developers ( like the XviD, Lame, MPC, FAAC/FFAD people ) can release 
their code with one working API only, and this can be compiled for all 
platforms.

No idea if Xine could be extended for this, if so i promise to work hard 
the complete OSS Windows world will stop using crappy VCM/ACM stuff and 
support the API at least as 2nd option. The XviD dev API4 could be used 
as a good example API, i dont know, after all i heard it is pretty 
powerful and can be used for more than just a MPEG4 codec.

Sorry if my ideas are not feasible or simply stupid, i'm not a developer 
myself but only a project admin, its hard to estimate for me if a 
general playback app API like Xine's ( with its own encoder in the 
package also ) could be a basis for such an API .

Best regards

Christian
http://www.matroska.org



-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by: INetU
Attention Web Developers & Consultants: Become An INetU Hosting Partner.
Refer Dedicated Servers. We Manage Them. You Get 10% Monthly Commission!
INetU Dedicated Managed Hosting http://www.inetu.net/partner/index.php