A gst bug?

I was trying these last two weeks, while I'm working in UI features, to figure out why sometimes my conversion freezes. I debugged a bit and found that, rarely, if I don't put a time.sleep(1) before playing the pipeline, the pipeline goes to READY state instead of going to PLAYING state. Query goes to position 0, and no error message, neither warning, are sent from bus. If I try to change again to PLAYING state, it stays in READY.

I posted a simple example at http://gstreamer.pastebin.com/m4fd1d90e , it's based in the decodebin.py example from pygst but I changed to convert to audio and do it 50 times. You can just run it on a terminal with a video as parameter, and check if all 50 videos passed ok. If they pass ok, try sometimes, it's very rarely to happen on this example, as it's a small program, but on gstms is giving many times. I want to know if this bug just happens on my computer or it's a gst bug - or if I'm forgetting something else. BTW, I'm using Ubuntu 8.04 and last stable gstreamer.

If you want to check the alpha version - which I didn't released yet because of this bug - you can download it from svn.

Trying to release an alpha version

These last two weeks I tried to release a working version of gst-media-services, but I have a unknown bug: sometime, for some type of streams, the pipeline just got paused. I did some things, suggested from IRC community, but it still bugging rarely. The most strange thing on this part is, if I put a time.sleep of 1 second between the gstreamer pipeline linkage and the pipeline play, it works everytime! It's look as sometimes the construction of pipeline isn't being completed, so, has any way of I wait for the pipeline to be complete functional until I set to play state? Ok, I'll spend more time on this these next days.

Also, I want to release an alpha on the Google Summer of Code deadline, August 18th, so, expect something working on my next post. The interface is working ok, and conversion is going rightly, reading elements and constructing pipeline from EncodingProfiles.

Desired transcode operations

I'm inviting everyone to help with the desired transcode operations, what operations of conversion, extraction and merging of videos, audios and why not images do you want to do easily, or you already do but not so easily. Here at the project wiki you can just use the template to fill with your operations. This can contribute to I see what Gstreamer can offer (with my gst-registry read, previous post) and what people want to do. And if you hate wikis you can email me or just comment here at the blog and I put at the wiki!
I also created a space at google code where you all can track my work of transcoder application, and redesigned the wiki. I also didn't so much in this last week because of some exams, and I have some this week too so I want to collect information to the application too, while I'll design some possible UI dialogs for the project. The idea of these dialogs is to offer them as a part of gst-media-services to all applications, so a great challenge on this is how to make them usable by different apps. Suggestions are welcome.

Reading from Gst Registry

This last week I worked to read info from GstRegistry. This info should help the EncodingProfiles list of possible formats to convert, and also, as commented in my previous post from Laszlo, this could help on recognizing mimetypes supported too.

It was not hard to read plugins and their features - as these all are very well documented in Gstreamer docs, I just lost some time searching the "get_possible_dynamic_pad_templates". The possible dynamic pads templates are included in the static templates... So I read their pads templates and caps, then I just need to parse them in somehow to it help in building profiles list. Parsing registry is needed too to check if plugins from each transcode operation are available.

With registry parsed, now comes the question: How it could help to build the list? A way that I'm thinking on is to rank the features by their caps mimetypes which each one can generate, and then somehow put them in XML list to help others to compose each transcode operation. Another way is to just build a table with these info, allowing re-ordering and filtering according to each feature details. Ideas?

Hello world

This is a hello world post, where I want to say hello to all gst community! I am one of accepted students to work in Google Summer of Code with the project Media services to transcode video and audio in different formats, and want to make a great project, which is intended to help users and applications, offering them services to transcode videos and sounds with gstreamer.

For who is interested in more details, check the wiki design at Gstreamer Wiki. This blog is intended to report what I'm doing during my (winter) summer, so please contribute with suggestions always, as I'm here to learn with everyone. Oh, and vote for what is the best name of this project, in this blog poll, I don't like MediaTrans too much.