Re: GStreamer xwidget

[Richard Stallman]

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  > > 1. Does playbin offer any hooks for the calling program to judge the 
plug-ins
  > > it wants to load, and say "That plug-in is ok" or "That plug-in is no 
good"?
  > > If it does, using them would be simpler and less work.

  > > 3. We could make a copy of the code for playbin under another name,
  > > and add those hooks to it.  We coulod link it staticly with Emacs.

  > That would certainly complicate the Emacs building process a great deal.
  > Building GStreamer (including GStreamer plugins) is no easy task!

We don't have to include the modified playbin _in GStreamer itself_.
We could make it self-contained by copying in whatever GStreamer
header material it depends on, so it will build easily as part of
Emacs.

However, releasing a modified GStreamer (modified in playbin) is
another alternative.  Free distros could use that version of
GStreamer.

The clean solution is to include those hooks in the main GStreamer
release; then Emacs can simply use them.  But we can't implement that
ourselves.  We can hope that the GStreamer developers will do so, but
until then, we don't have a responsibility to make this clean.  It is
ok if it includes kludges, as long as it doesn't make a lot of work
for us.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)