Updates on Gstreamer land
After some months without publish updates, I liked to take a moment to keep everyone posted on the latest news about what is going on with the GStreamer for TI processors project.
The first thing that looks very nice is that we are moving some of the info on the site wiki to the mediawiki-based Davinci Wiki. In particular Todd has done a great job with the getting started guide. Mediawiki style is very helpful in the look and feel (and readability) of the documentation.
Functionality wise, we are starting the testing cycle for the 1.1 release with some minor improvements like:
- Support for DM365
- Resizer element (like a videoscale but in hardware)
- Performance element
- Updated for the latest OMAP3 DVSDK
- Minor internal performance tweaking
We have added some more engineers to the community supporting the project as well, how are helping answering questions on the forums and doing the testing cycle for the new release.
But what’s more exciting is what we are working for the next release: the 2.0. This release will be a merge of many of the functionality from DDOMPE branch into the trunk (and we got kapil busy on that 
):
- Removal of the build system for the opensource elements and shell scripts. Get the system using pre-built binaries from Arago project along with detailed instructions to reproduce the build environment. The SCM system will host only the code for the DMAI plugins.
- Simpler build system with reduce requirement for environment variables, and configure options for setting the configuration (pretty sure Koen will appreciate that). This will allow disabling elements and formats that aren’t supported for a particular configuration (you don’t want your decodebin picking up an element to just fail miserably because the codec server doesn’t implement that format).
- Support for adding custom configurations to the build system for easily integration with custom codec servers.
- Support for a single class of encoder/decoders for all formats and xDAIS APIs: this makes the code way more maintainable.
- Support for optional parsers to replace the circular buffer implementation (which will be the fallback mechanism on parser absence) . This greatly reduce the memory footprint during decoding.
- Support for flush operations, frame clipping, QoS, during decoding, enabling support for trick-play modes.
- Support for enhanced encoder with reduced memory usage, optimized buffer output (using a circular buffer), codec_data caps generation (for compatibility with standard media players of the muxed files), and optional implementation of properties to set the advance options of the codec being used.
- DM355s codecs support.
All of the described functionality is already present on Diego’s branch, but not very well tested across all platforms. We will be stabilizing it and testing it heavily with a new automated framework for the 2.0 release on Q1 2010. Anyway if you want to get started using this functionality remember that RidgeRun offers support services on gstreamer and you can always contact us.
We have been also working on providing a simple FOSS streaming media solution based on gstreamer and got some prototype demo cross compiling the Darwin Streaming Server into a Davinci board and using as RTSP server.
Lot of exciting things ahead!