GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 549111
pbutils: Expose more information about media types (audio, video, container, ...) in missing plugin messages
Last modified: 2018-11-03 11:14:35 UTC
It would be useful to be able to inspect missing-plugin messages, so that applications can avoid requesting installation of plugins that they won't use anyway. The only use case I have is for audio-only applications that frequently have to deal with video and random other files. Currently, when rhythmbox runs across a video file for which no decoder is installed, it will request installation of the decoder, then, after forcing the user to hit a few buttons, it will ignore the file, because it's only interested in audio files. What I'd like to do here is ignore the file immediately, by checking the missing-plugin messages to see if a video decoder is required. I'm not really sure what an API for this would look like, or what information it would expose. The code I'm playing with now will get the type and (if it's a decoder) caps out of the missing-plugins message and then check media types. This doesn't really feel like it's guaranteed to be stable, and checking media types never seems like a good idea.
Not sure how this could be implemented as you can't really say from the media type if it's video or a container format... for example avi is "video/x-msvideo" but you would want a demuxer for this.
gst-libs/gst/pbutils/descriptions.c seems to contain that knowledge already (FLAG_CONTAINER), so maybe that could be exposed? I don't think demuxers would be a huge problem, though, because most of the interesting ones have no external dependencies and are in -good or -base, so they'll usually be installed already.
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