21
49
in tests. If you're looking for a role model to base your own plug-in on,
25
52
If you find a plot hole or a badly lip-synced line of code in them,
26
53
let us know - it is a matter of honour for us to ensure Blondie doesn't look
27
54
like he's been walking 100 miles through the desert without water.
30
This module contains a set of plug-ins that we consider to have good quality
58
--- "When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk."
60
There are times when the world needs a color between black and white.
61
Quality code to match the good's, but two-timing, backstabbing and ready to
62
sell your freedom down the river. These plug-ins might have a patent noose
63
around their neck, or a lock-up license, or any other problem that makes you
64
think twice about shipping them.
66
We don't call them ugly because we like them less. Does a mother love her
67
son less because he's not as pretty as the other ones ? No - she commends
68
him on his great personality. These plug-ins are the life of the party.
69
And we'll still step in and set them straight if you report any unacceptable
70
behaviour - because there are two kinds of people in the world, my friend:
71
those with a rope around their neck and the people who do the cutting.
75
--- "That an accusation?"
77
No perfectly groomed moustache or any amount of fine clothing is going to
78
cover up the truth - these plug-ins are Bad with a capital B.
79
They look fine on the outside, and might even appear to get the job done, but
80
at the end of the day they're a black sheep. Without a golden-haired angel
81
to watch over them, they'll probably land in an unmarked grave at the final
84
Don't bug us about their quality - exercise your Free Software rights,
85
patch up the offender and send us the patch on the fastest steed you can
86
steal from the Confederates. Because you see, in this world, there's two
87
kinds of people, my friend: those with loaded guns and those who dig.
93
--- "I've never seen so many plug-ins wasted so badly."
95
GStreamer Plug-ins has grown so big that it's hard to separate the wheat from
96
the chaff. Also, distributors have brought up issues about the legal status
97
of some of the plug-ins we ship. To remedy this, we've divided the previous
98
set of available plug-ins into four modules:
100
- gst-plugins-base: a small and fixed set of plug-ins, covering a wide range
101
of possible types of elements; these are continuously kept up-to-date
102
with any core changes during the development series.
104
- We believe distributors can safely ship these plug-ins.
105
- People writing elements should base their code on these elements.
106
- These elements come with examples, documentation, and regression tests.
108
- gst-plugins-good: a set of plug-ins that we consider to have good quality
31
109
code, correct functionality, our preferred license (LGPL for the plug-in
32
110
code, LGPL or LGPL-compatible for the supporting library).
33
We believe distributors can safely ship these plug-ins.
34
People writing elements should base their code on these elements.
36
Other modules containing plug-ins are:
40
contains a basic set of well-supported plug-ins
42
contains a set of well-supported plug-ins, but might pose problems for
45
contains a set of less supported plug-ins that haven't passed the
46
rigorous quality testing we expect
51
Features of this release
53
* Parallel installability with 0.8.x series
54
* Threadsafe design and API
55
* added speex RTP payloader/depayloader
57
* fractional framerates
58
* more video filters now use BaseTransform
60
Bugs fixed in this release
65
You can find source releases of gst-plugins-good in the download directory:
66
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/src/gst-plugins-good/
70
More details can be found on the project's website:
71
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/
75
We use GNOME's bugzilla for bug reports and feature requests:
76
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=GStreamer
80
CVS is hosted on cvs.freedesktop.org.
81
All code is in CVS and can be checked out from there.
82
Interested developers of the core library, plug-ins, and applications should
83
subscribe to the gstreamer-devel list. If there is sufficient interest we
84
will create more lists as necessary.
89
Contributors to this release
97
* Thomas Vander Stichele
112
- We believe distributors can safely ship these plug-ins.
113
- People writing elements should base their code on these elements.
115
- gst-plugins-ugly: a set of plug-ins that have good quality and correct
116
functionality, but distributing them might pose problems. The license
117
on either the plug-ins or the supporting libraries might not be how we'd
118
like. The code might be widely known to present patent problems.
120
- Distributors should check if they want/can ship these plug-ins.
121
- People writing elements should base their code on these elements.
123
- gst-plugins-bad: a set of plug-ins that aren't up to par compared to the
124
rest. They might be close to being good quality, but they're missing
125
something - be it a good code review, some documentation, a set of tests,
126
a real live maintainer, or some actual wide use.
127
If the blanks are filled in they might be upgraded to become part of
128
either gst-plugins-good or gst-plugins-ugly, depending on the other factors.
130
- If the plug-ins break, you can't complain - instead, you can fix the
131
problem and send us a patch, or bribe someone into fixing them for you.
132
- New contributors can start here for things to work on.
137
- Linux is of course fully supported
138
- FreeBSD is reported to work; other BSD's should work too
139
- Solaris is reported to work; a specific sunaudiosink plugin has been written
140
- MacOSX is reported to work; specific audio and video sinks have been written
141
- Windows support is experimental but improving. Output sinks have been
142
written but are not yet included in the code. We support
144
- Microsoft Visual Studio 6 builds (see win32/README.txt)
146
INSTALLING FROM PACKAGES
147
------------------------
149
You should always prefer installing from packages first. GStreamer is
150
well-maintained for a number of distributions, including Fedora, Debian,
151
Ubuntu, Mandrake, Gentoo, ...
153
Only in cases where you:
154
- want to hack on GStreamer
155
- want to verify that a bug has been fixed
156
- do not have a sane distribution
157
should you choose to build from source tarballs or CVS.
159
Find more information about the various packages at
160
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/download/
162
COMPILING FROM SOURCE TARBALLS
163
------------------------------
165
- again, make sure that you really need to install from source !
166
If GStreamer is one of your first projects ever that you build from source,
167
consider taking on an easier project.
169
- check output of ./configure --help to see if any options apply to you
175
- if you want to install it (not required, but what you usually want to do), run
178
- try out a simple test:
179
gst-launch -v fakesrc num_buffers=5 ! fakesink
180
(If you didn't install GStreamer, prefix gst-launch with tools/)
182
If it outputs a bunch of messages from fakesrc and fakesink, everything is
185
If it did not work, keep in mind that you might need to adjust the
186
PATH and/or LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variables to make the system
187
find GStreamer in the prefix where you installed (by default that is /usr/local).
189
- After this, you're ready to install gst-plugins, which will provide the
190
functionality you're probably looking for by now, so go on and read
196
When building from CVS sources, you will need to run autogen.sh to generate
197
the build system files.
199
You will need a set of additional tools typical for building from CVS,
205
autogen.sh will check for recent enough versions and complain if you don't have
206
them. You can also specify specific versions of automake and autoconf with
207
--with-automake and --with-autoconf
209
Check autogen.sh options by running autogen.sh --help
211
autogen.sh can pass on arguments to configure - you just need to separate them
212
from autogen.sh with -- between the two.
213
prefix has been added to autogen.sh but will be passed on to configure because
214
some build scripts like that.
216
When you have done this once, you can use autoregen.sh to re-autogen with
217
the last passed options as a handy shortcut. Use it.
219
After the autogen.sh stage, you can follow the directions listed in
220
"COMPILING FROM SOURCE"
222
You can also run your whole cvs stack uninstalled. The script in
223
the gstreamer module /docs/faq/gst-uninstalled) is helpful in setting
224
up your environment for this.
226
PLUG-IN DEPENDENCIES AND LICENSES
227
---------------------------------
229
GStreamer is developed under the terms of the LGPL (see LICENSE file for
230
details). Some of our plug-ins however rely on libraries which are available
231
under other licenses. This means that if you are distributing an application
232
which has a non-GPL compatible license (for instance a closed-source
233
application) with GStreamer, you have to make sure not to distribute GPL-linked
236
When using GPL-linked plug-ins, GStreamer is for all practical reasons
237
under the GPL itself.
242
The fundamental design comes from the video pipeline at Oregon Graduate
243
Institute, as well as some ideas from DirectMedia. It's based on plug-ins that
244
will provide the various codec and other functionality. The interface
245
hopefully is generic enough for various companies (ahem, Apple) to release
246
binary codecs for Linux, until such time as they get a clue and release the
added
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README
