gstreamer/docs/random/wtay/network-transp

Network Transparent elements
----------------------------

1) netbin

   - exposes local shims and remote real elements.
   - all shim pads can be connected to other shim
     pads and operations are proxied to real elements.
   - when the pads are not part of the same bin, network
     transparent ghostpads are created to connect them.
   - bin has host property to indicate where it should
     run.

2) netpipeline

   - synchronizes different netbins, this means distributing
     the same element base time to the remote bins.
   - clocks master/slave is set up.

3) netpad

   - all pad operations are proxied to peer pad using
     a network protocol, possibly selectable from RTP/TCP/....
     Serialisation of buffers and events are to be considered
     but also methods with their arguments. A generator would
     not be too bad to automate this.
   - the implementation would be fairly similar to the
     ghostpad implementation.
   - This includes event passing (bidirectional) and
     data passing (unidirectional). Some events have to pass
     in parallel with the datastream so the event path should
     use a different connection.
     
4) GStreamer daemon

   - each host has to run a daemon that listens for
     commands and creates elements/pipelines and performs all
     operations on the real pipeline.

Other stuff
-----------

 - what about migrating elements from one host to another. This
   would happen when an element is removed form a bin into another
   bin. 

 - do we have/need a fast protocol for stuff on the same machine or
   will regular network connections work fine?