[Ambulant-users] [Question] firefox ambulant plug-in

[Kees Blom]

On 24/03/10 09:09, Aston_Ho at wistron.com wrote:
>
> Hello Blom,
>
>  I am Aston, Nail and I work in Wistron. First we are very thankful 
> for your help to release beta10 for us.
>
> We already build the plug-in on our arm-based Linux system, but we got 
> the result of poor performance.
>
> We think the reason is to use Freescale i.MX51 Soc and the HW decode 
> rely on Gstreamer, but maybe your solution is use the FFMpage or others.
>
> The totem player with the Gstreamer library on our system can get 
> better performance.
>
> So, would you please try to apply the Gstreamer library into the 
> ambulant plug-in.
>
> We very much hope that through this project with Ambulant solutions to 
> allow more users to their favorite (of course, also love Ambulant too)
>
> Finally, We very much hope to get your help!
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Aston
>
Hi Aston,

Currently, ambulant for linux is based on ffmpeg.

Sometime in the past we've done some experimental work using gstreamer 
for audio rendering in AmbulantPlayer (not the plugin), for use in Nokia 
770, also arm, also gstreamer based,
for similar reasons as you mentioned (obtaining better audio performance 
using HW accelerators).

I think the old code is still there and there is still an option 
--with-gstreamer
in the ambulant configure script but it is old (4 years) and unmaintained.
However, there are a number of problems I know of.

1. The Nokia N770/N800/N810/N900 platforms are not supported anymore by 
the Ambulant team,
     because focus has shifted to other goals.
2. The experimental gstreamer code is incomplete and probably buggy.
     For example, Pause/PlayStop does not work, and AmbulantPlayer (on 
Nokia Nxxx) may crash.
3. Many SMIL-3.0 features are not implemented and some of them cannot be 
implemented using the
     gstreamer approach, for example transitions (fade etc.), 
animations, clipBegin/clipEnd, and so on
     (at least at the time I could not see how to do that with 
acceptable performance on these platforms).
4. For a particular platform, in gstreamer terms, a specific pipeline 
needs to be constructed.
     For the Nokia platforms cited an element called "dspmp3sink" was 
needed to be used.
     For your platform, this is probably something different.
5. Internally the ambulant API's have been changed quite a lot, s.t. the 
gstreamer code most likely will
     not compile anymore.
6. The same may be true for the gstreamer API's, at the time I worked 
with it, it was a moving target.

That said, the existing gstreamer code could be of some help for 
interfacing with ambulant,
but it will need quite some non-trivial programming to accomplish the 
desired result.

Sincerely,

Kees Blom.







-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.ambulantplayer.org/pipermail/ambulant-users/attachments/20100324/358e17e4/attachment.html>