gstreamer/docs/manual/goals.sgml
Wim Taymans 018a6f381b First draft of Chapter 1 (introduction) and Chapter 2 (basic concepts) of the GStreamer manual.
Original commit message from CVS:
First draft of Chapter 1 (introduction) and Chapter 2 (basic concepts)
of the GStreamer manual.
2000-08-16 21:38:57 +00:00

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<chapter id="cha-goals">
<title>Goals</title>
<para>
GStreamer was designed to provide a solution to the current Linux media
problems.
</para>
<sect1 id="sec-goals-design">
<title>The design goals</title>
<para>
We descibe what we try to achieve with GStreamer.
</para>
<sect2 id="sec-goals-clean">
<title>Clean and powerfull</title>
<para>
GStreamer wants to provide a clean interface to:
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
The application programmer who wants to build a media pipeline.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The plugin programmer.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</sect2>
<sect2 id="sec-goals-object">
<title>Object oriented</title>
<para>
Adhere as much as possible to the GTK+ object model. A programmer familiar
with GTK+ will be confortable with GStreamer.
</para>
<para>
GStreamer uses the mechanisems of signals and object arguments.
</para>
</sect2>
<sect2 id="sec-goals-extensible">
<title>Extensible</title>
<para>
All GStreamer Objects can be extended using the GTK+ inheritance methods.
</para>
<para>
All plugins are loaded dynamically and can be extended and upgraded
independently.
</para>
</sect2>
<sect2 id="sec-goals-binary">
<title>Allow binary only plugins</title>
<para>
plugins are shared libraries that are loaded at runtime. since all the
properties of the plugin can be set using the GtkObject arguments, there
is no need to have any header files installed for the plugins.
</para>
</sect2>
<sect2 id="sec-goals-performance">
<title>High performance</title>
<para>
High performance is obtained by:
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Using glib g_mem_chunk where possible to minimize dynamic memory
allocation.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Connections between plugins are extremely light-weight. Data can travel
the pipeline with minimal overhead.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Provide a mechanism to directly work on the target memory. A
plugin can for example directly write to the X servers shared mem.
Buffers can also point to arbitrary memory like kernel memory.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Refcounting and copy on write to minimize the amount of memcpy.
Subbufers to efficiently split the data in a buffer.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Pipelines can be constructed using cothreads to minimize the
threading overhead. Cothreads are a simple user-space method for
switching between subtasks.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
HW acceleration is possible by writing a specialized plugin.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</sect2>
</sect1>
</chapter>