Audience

What's the benefits of using GStreamer over MPlayer?

Asked by Reda Lazri (0rAX0)

Hi,

I tried to play some MP4 files but both Audience and Totem failed to open. So I want to know what are the benefits of choosing GStreamer as a backend over MPlayer? While MPlayer seems to open everything I throw at it.

Also, would it be possible to have Audience use multiple backends? Either at compile time or in the preferences.

Thank you.

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Audience Edit question
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Cody Garver
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Best Cody Garver (codygarver) said : 		#1

I have dreamt up a system where Audience falls back to mplayer when things don't work but so far it's just speculation.

The benefits of gstreamer are better integration with the system since it's part of the GNOME stack (and other details that escape me) but it's not as feature-laden as mplayer.

Another benefit of the mplayer backend is automatic hardware-accelerated h264 (and those mp4s that don't work).

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Reda Lazri (0rAX0) (0rax0) said : 		#2

Um, I kind of phrased the last sentence incorrectly. What I meant was, letting the user choose whether they want to use MPlayer of GStreamer. Is it possible now?

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Reda Lazri (0rAX0) (0rax0) said : 		#3

*or

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Cody Garver (codygarver) said : 		#4

No, mplayer support isn't present.

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Reda Lazri (0rAX0) (0rax0) said : 		#5

Thanks Cody Garver, that solved my question.

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Reda Lazri (0rAX0) (0rax0) said : 		#6

Thanks.

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Pim Vullers (pimvullers) said : 		#7

Supporting multiple backends is difficult since this would require having some kind of abstraction layer over these. Which would probably result in not getting the best out of a specific backend.

A nice alternative would be that GStreamer itself offers an MPlayer plugin.