LinuxPower: GStreamer: The future of Linux Multimedia

[ Thanks to Christian
Schaller for this link. ]

“In the Linux community there are a lot of projects getting
started everyday. Some die quickly, others hang on for a little
while before dwindling away. Then there are a few which seem to
explode onto the scene overnight and quickly gain lots of user and
developer support. The truth of projects like these are usually
that they have been the target of some hard and talented work for a
long time by a single hacker or just a small group of hackers,
before being discovered by the rest of the world and catching on.
One of the projects which recently seemed to burst onto the Linux
scene out of nowhere with explosive power is GStreamer. In this
interview with project founder Erik Walthinsen we will discover
that there was nothing overnight about GStreamer’s recent rise to
fame at all, rather the hard work off a dedicated team. This hard
work has really paid of with Erik getting hired by embedded Linux
distribution company RidgeRun, Inc. to work fulltime on
GStreamer….”

“How did the GStreamer project get started?”

“Erik: It started out back at OGI when we were having almost
daily discussions about what was wrong with the pipeline, I started
to formulate some ideas as to how to make it better. One of the
most fundamental was the fact that every single operation in the
dozen-stage pipeline was a separate pthread. Because part of our
research was into a kernel scheduler that would allocate some
percentage of the CPU to each thread, having threads that took
1/10,000th of the CPU was kinda hard. So I made a conscious
decision to work around that problem by making threads explicit
instead of implicit….”

Complete
Story