I just committed some fixes to GStreamer CVS, and now I’m finally starting to see how totally wrong some things still are to make it as perfect as it needs to be and how much work this will need to get done.

Sure, we can play back a media file. That was hard. I’m talking about advanced stuff. Talk about loading 1000 pipelines at the same time and play fragments of each sequentially. Random codecs, random video/audio combinations, random frame sizes, random audio samplerates, anything mixed. Now get that playing (and seeking!) without a glitch, even during per-pipeline transitions. and that’s just the start, because I want scenes playing in a small subframe of another scene, transitions, and all the like. And all that in real-time. That’s what I want. Eh, we have a lot of work left.

Anyway, we take small steps at a time, but we’re making progress. I’m currently trying to perfectize a graphical video capture tool, and am preparing a graphical transcoder. Think in terms of virtualdub or so. Simple yet effective. Premiere will come later…

Andrew is doing real cool stuff, he’s helping out in making the professional-quality MPEG/DVD tools mpeg2enc and mplex available to GStreamer. These are the sort of toys that we need to get some true quality out of this thing. DivX and all is nice, but nothing can compare to DVDs. Even if it was only for the fact that my DVD player doesn’t play back DivX or alike. That’s why I’m doing this stuff, this is what I want to do in the end. This is why Mac OS X is so far beyond perfect! And we’ll get there too.