GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 364056
Improve FAQ for Gstreamer
Last modified: 2007-09-24 17:27:23 UTC
1. Current FAQ fails to make clear in the Using Gstreamer section the following: a. there are apparently currently two versions of various CLI utilities such as gst-inspect and gst-launch - i.e. one must append 0.8 or 0.10 - therefore the commands indicated in the FAQ don't work as stated. b. there are currently various groups of plugins - good, bad, ugly - for 0.10 (I think?) - to use the 0.10 CLI utilities one needs these plugins - not the 0.8 ones. 2. I mention the above because, due to the lack of clear documentation, a superficial look at what is available would result in the conclusion that it does not work or does not work well. You should provide some very basic, but precise instructions that allow a casual observer to observe the best performance of gstreamer without very much effort (i.e. the instructions should work uniformly across a range of OSs/distributions etc). These instructions should be in a prominent position on your website, rather than buried in a FAQ, with a big button saying "Try It". The instructions should also include simple code that demonstrates the same functionality - the code should be using your C library and other renditions using various bindings such as Python etc. The casual observer is mainly interested in seeing it work in various forms first and can always go back later to understand the details of how to construct the application. This exercise will also force a check of how well all these renditions really work across a range of platforms. 3. Marketing is not a favorite task for those really interested in creating great software, but, as you likely know, marketing is important to gain acceptance. Marketing in this case boils down to showing great performance very directly. 4. I have more than a casual interest in this area and hence continued to look farther, though the performance was not so great initially. 5. I thought I would send you this report as a heads-up. 6. Appreciate the efforts on gstreamer - I hope it turns out to be all that the gstreamer team imagines it will be.
Its been said with every release that the 0.8 and 0.10 series are parallel installable. The examples given in the FAQ work, as if you omit the version number (e.g. simply call gst-inspect) it will call the 0.10 version for now and once/if there is 0.12 that one. So if you fnd specific examples that don't work, please let us know.
Quoting charles bartlett <csbartlett@comcast.net>: >If the command in the FAQ had worked as stated, I would not have spent >the time submitting the bug. Why it apparently works for you, but not >me, is unknown. Then lets find out. I suspect its your distribution. What are you using? Check if you have the unversioned 'gst-launch' installed at all.
Charles, are you interested to resolv this?
Added something about the different GStreamer versions, incl. tools and plugins, to the FAQ: 2007-09-24 Tim-Philipp Müller <tim at centricular dot net> * docs/faq/getting.xml: Add Q+A about different GStreamer versions (#364056). Admittedly our website isn't great, but there's just so much information overall that it's hard to put it somewhere where it's not "buried" in one way or another. Putting it into the FAQ seems good enough to me (even if our FAQ sucks in many respects), since that's where I'd expect people to look first if they have a question. gst-inspect is a thin wrapper script and should call the 'latest' gst-inspect-A.B tool. If that doesn't happen, it's probably a packaging bug of some sort (it's a bit tricky from a packaging point of view since you have two packages containing /usr/bin/gst-inspect if you just put the stuff 'make install' installs into a package). Please file further bugs if there's anything else that you think is missing in our docs, thanks!