Replace PV with GStreamer

[johnny]

GStreamer is a widely supported multimedia framework in Linux world. I
don't know why Google chooses PV. Technically I don't see any feature
that PV has while GStreamer doesn't have. So I am wondering if there
is anyone here already looking at this task.

[Freepine]

Yes, so it would be great if you could port it and release a patch to android:)

BTW: It would be even better if you could eliminate its heavy dependency on glib and it would be my favorite if someone can rewrite it in C++:)

[Paranoia]

maybe google does not like gstreamer's license...

and i do not like glib either.

[David Turner]

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 1:54 PM, johnny <john...@gmail.com> wrote:

GStreamer is a widely supported multimedia framework in Linux world. I
don't know why Google chooses PV.

Because PV agreed to release its library under the Apache license.

 

Technically I don't see any feature
that PV has while GStreamer doesn't have. So I am wondering if there
is anyone here already looking at this task.

LGPL / GPL are a no go for system libraries in the official Android open-source tree.
this is independent of features and other purely technical considerations.

[Adam Treat]

On Thursday 15 January 2009 10:22:46 am David Turner wrote:
> LGPL / GPL are a no go for system libraries in the official Android
> open-source tree.

Is WebKit not considered a system provided library by Android? I would
imagine it is since you have public API that depends upon it. WebKit is in
large part... LGPL. If you don't mind my asking, how is this squared?

Cheers,
Adam

[Jean-Baptiste Queru]

It causes enough pain that it's a reminder, not a precedent.

JBQ

--
Jean-Baptiste M. "JBQ" Queru
Android Engineer, Google.

[David Turner]

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 4:40 PM, Jean-Baptiste Queru <j...@google.com> wrote:

It causes enough pain that it's a reminder, not a precedent.

exactly, including any non Apache/BSD/MIT/PD code in Android cannot be performed without huge negociations between all OHA partners. It has been really hard to get where we are today, and it is very very unlikely that things will change much further.

[johnny]

I checked the latest code of Android, someone from windriver has
ported the ALSA lib to Android and merged it into Android repository.
ALSA lib is release under LGPL. Did it go through some kind of
negotiation before it is merged to Android? If I am self port the
GStreamer to Android, can I merge it to Android code base?

Thanks,
Johnny Xia.

[David Turner]

that's a very good point. I didn't realize this.

I'm going to check with the appropriate people and will provide an answer to this question.

[johnny]

David,

Do you get any feedback from Android team?

Thanks,
Johnny Xia.

On 1月16日, 下午5时50分, David Turner <di...@android.com> wrote:
> that's a very good point. I didn't realize this.I'm going to check with the

> appropriate people and will provide an answer to this question.
>

[David Turner]

I can't provide any official feedback at the moment.

However, I can say that the point is being discussed pretty seriously at the moment and we plan to officialy and clearly articulate the rationale for inclusion of LGPL and other licensed code in the core Android platform.
And I can't really give an ETA for this right now, but will, as promise try to answer as soon as I can

[bhoj]

Hello all,


I am interested in this . Will there be poosiblity of this to happen ?
To port Gstreamer one would need Glib too to be ported to Android .
I'll be waiting for the updates on this. Has any one succesfully
added external packages like Glib to Android ? Is it possible ?

On Jan 19, 6:31 pm, David Turner <di...@android.com> wrote:
> I can't provide any official feedback at the moment.
>
> However, I can say that the point is being discussed pretty seriously at the
> moment and we plan to officialy and clearly articulate the rationale for
> inclusion of LGPL and other licensed code in the core Android platform.
> And I can't really give an ETA for this right now, but will, as promise try
> to answer as soon as I can
>

[Jean-Baptiste Queru]

The current state of things is that webkit and bluez are grandfathered
in as user-space (L)GPL components of the core platform, but not other
such components will be added. Apache and BSD/MIT are the licenses of
choice for the Android Open-Source Project.

See http://source.android.com/project/core-technical-team/minutes/2009-01-20
for the official word.

JBQ

[sunwrt]

Actually, porting the gstreamer to android is very difficult.

I have ported the gstreamer-0.10.21 to iPhone and it works very good.
I also built the gstreamer successfully with CodeSourcery toochain,
but I can't make it work because It's plugin dynamic module can't work
in Android.

Android does not use glibc. It make porting work difficult, especially
glib, gettext.

On 1月23日, 下午6时43分, bhoj <vishalb...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I am interested in this . Will there be poosiblity of this to happen ?

> To portGstreamerone would need Glib too to be ported to Android .

> I'll be waiting for the updates on this. Has any one succesfully
> added external packages like Glib to Android ? Is it possible ?
>
> On Jan 19, 6:31 pm, David Turner <di...@android.com> wrote:
>
> > I can't provide any official feedback at the moment.
>
> > However, I can say that the point is being discussed pretty seriously at the
> > moment and we plan to officialy and clearly articulate the rationale for
> > inclusion of LGPL and other licensed code in the core Android platform.
> > And I can't really give an ETA for this right now, but will, as promise try
> > to answer as soon as I can
>
> > On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 9:59 PM, johnny <johnny...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > David,
>
> > > Do you get any feedback from Android team?
>
> > > Thanks,
> > > Johnny Xia.
>
> > > On 1月16日, 下午5时50分, David Turner <di...@android.com> wrote:
> > > > that's a very good point. I didn't realize this.I'm going to check with
> > > the
> > > > appropriate people and will provide an answer to this question.
>
> > > > On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 6:37 AM, johnny <johnny...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > > > I checked the latest code of Android, someone from windriver has
> > > > > ported the ALSA lib to Android and merged it into Android repository.
> > > > > ALSA lib is release under LGPL. Did it go through some kind of
> > > > > negotiation before it is merged to Android? If I am self port the

> > > > >GStreamerto Android, can I merge it to Android code base?

[David Turner]

You don't need gettext() for a native library that runs in an embedded system like Android, you can probably disable its use through configure options.
I would start exploring this is you're serious about porting Glib / GStreamer etc... to the platform.

But please drop the CodeSourcery toolchain, this is going to create more problems than you imagine.

[twebb]

On Feb 17, 5:45 am, David Turner <di...@android.com> wrote:
>
> But please drop the CodeSourcery toolchain, this is going to create more
> problems than you imagine.
>

Could you expand on this statement? I thought the Android SDK
actually specified (or at least suggested) using the CodeSourcery
toolchain. If not CodeSourcery, what toolchain is required for cross-
compiling for an ARM target?

[Edward Hervey]

Hi,

There's a toolchain in the prebuilt/<your_arch>/toolchain/ directory.

Not that it makes it any easier to build gstreamer :)

Edward

[David Turner]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 3:27 PM, twebb <taliaf...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Feb 17, 5:45 am, David Turner <di...@android.com> wrote:
>
> But please drop the CodeSourcery toolchain, this is going to create more
> problems than you imagine.
>

Could you expand on this statement?  I thought the Android SDK
actually specified (or at least suggested) using the CodeSourcery
toolchain.

I don't think so
 

 If not CodeSourcery, what toolchain is required for cross-
compiling for an ARM target?

the one that comes with the Android open-source tree, located in prebuilt/<yoursystem>/toolchain
and automatically used by the Android build system.

The real issue is that without the exact set of compiler and linker options, the exact linker script,
using the CodeSourcery toolchain is likely to generate a binary that will not run properly on Android.

If you're lucky, it will not load or link. If you're not lucky, it will but later will either crash or corrupt
memory.

Also, we are updating the toolchain continuously, so this means the options/scripts might need
to be changed over time if you stick to CodeSourcery.

That's not a really pleasant situation, I admit, and I don't know the historical reason why we are
not using the CodeSourcery works. Maybe we'll switch to it in the future, but switching toolchains
is a very rough experiment that requires extensive testing of all the platform.

[johnny]

Hi David,

What do you mean by this?

"I would start exploring this is you're serious about porting Glib /
GStreamer etc... to the platform."

Will google start to consider porting GStreamer to Android? I am very
interested in this. We did some early investigation. Porting GLib is
not that difficult as we thought. Actually we have built the GLib in
Android environment successfully.

Regards,
Johnny Xia.



On Feb 18, 1:01 am, David Turner <di...@android.com> wrote:

[Edward Hervey]

On Wed, 2009-02-18 at 03:56 -0800, johnny wrote:
> Hi David,
>
> What do you mean by this?
> "I would start exploring this is you're serious about porting Glib /
> GStreamer etc... to the platform."
>
> Will google start to consider porting GStreamer to Android? I am very
> interested in this. We did some early investigation. Porting GLib is
> not that difficult as we thought. Actually we have built the GLib in
> Android environment successfully.

Hi,

Speaking on behalf of the GStreamer developer community, we would be
very interested to have any Makefiles/patches/comments/bugs reported
back to us so we can fix/commit those in the official gstreamer
repositories ASAP.
We could then create some android-specific branches in our git
repositories to properly integrate the Android-specific build system
there.

You're welcome to share your experience/feedback on:
* The Gstreamer development mailing-list :
gstream...@lists.sourceforge.net
* The #gstreamer channel on irc.freenode.net

Regards,

Edward

[Jean-Baptiste Queru]

It's unlikely that GStreamer would be accepted as part of the Android
Open-Source Project, at least because it would cause fragmentation
between devices running GStreamer and devices running OpenCORE. As the
media capabilities of Android extend, it'd get harder and harder to
maintain the two media frameworks in a way that exposes identical
functionality (and reducing functionality to the lowest common
denominator would be a regression compared to being able to use the
full functionality of OpenCORE).

JBQ

--

[Paranoia]

maybe such work can be done by the 3rd party independenty.

[Jean-Baptiste Queru]

If someone wants to use some code from the Android Open-Source
project, integrate GStreamer with it and ship products based on that,
they're very welcome to do it (as long as they stay within the limits
set by the licenses for the various relevant bits, of course), but
that discussion belongs on android-discuss, not on android-platform.

JBQ

[David Turner]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 12:56 PM, johnny <john...@gmail.com> wrote:

What do you mean by this?

"I would start exploring this is you're serious about porting Glib /
GStreamer etc... to the platform."

Will google start to consider porting GStreamer to Android? I am very
interested in this. We did some early investigation. Porting GLib is
not that difficult as we thought. Actually we have built the GLib in
Android environment successfully.

absolutely not, I was simply considering a third-party who would seriously considering
porting GLib / GStreamer to their own fork of the Android sources. It's highly unlikely
that this will happen within the OHA.
 

[li sun]

How to use android native toolchain to port a project?

For example, it is very easy to port a project, say libogg, to android
with the CodeSourcery toolchain .

I can do it as the following steps:
1. ./configure --host=arm-none-linux-gnueabi
2. make
3. make install

But I can't do so with the android native toolchain.

Can you give a easy way to port a project w/ the android native toolchain.

Thanks in advance !

2009/2/17 Edward Hervey <bil...@gmail.com>:

[vishal bhoj]

No you can do this way. you would need to write Android.mk file which is very easy to do and use android toolchain to build it against bionic C library.

--
with regards vishal