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Posts: 337 | Thanked: 160 times | Joined on Aug 2009 @ München, DE
#83
Originally Posted by christexaport View Post
@ Jack6428, let me sort of stick up for joppu on this one, because I see where he's coming from. I'll explain his stance in a nutshell, so let me know, joppu, if I'm offbase.

One of the tenets of open source is to not do the same work twice. VLC reinvented the wheel instead of improving the proven and working gstreamer.They provided a great app experience, but at the expense of the OS's growth. They could've upgraded or added to gstreamer, but they kept the codecs closed only for VLC's usage.
Ummm. That is so wrong in so many ways.

a) VLC is older than gstreamer. So no adding there.
b) mplayer (which joppu favors) is even less modular than vlc (if modularity is the issue at hand).

Still both use video libraries which can be reused by other applications if they want to.

VLC didn't reinvent the wheel, either (gstreamer is "just" a set of libraries, VLC is both: set of libs and GUI(s)).

Joppu wants all apps to work WITH the development previous devs have worked hard on to make it better. He is totally against splintering apps and doing work twice. I see his point, and look at VLC totally differently now. He's made a valid point, and we need to really look at how we choose and use code with the betterment of the OS in mind.

Had VLC done things right, most apps would work well, and it'd be all about the best interface. As they've done it, its the workability of the app that is its calling card, when they could've easily added them to gstreamer instead to improve the video experience on Linux across the board. It is a selfish move by VideoLan, but not a cardinal sin.
Again. That is completely wrong in many ways. gstreamer and VLC use the same de-/encoders and playback libraries, libavcodec and ffmpeg for example. Same goes for mplayer.

So I don't see where VLC should or could have added to the much younger gstreamer project and can understand why gstreamer was developed even though other solutions were already there. Licensing is one of the issues.

Last edited by range; 2009-11-04 at 01:42. Reason: Oops.
 

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