a few question wrt new release 1.8

[Andres Gonzalez]

Hi,

I have been using version 1.4.4 on a debian jessie box. All of the gstreamer libraries were installed using the regular apt-get packages that debian supplies. However, I now want to start using the latest 1.8 version and so I cannot rely on debian to provide the most recent packages.  It appears that debian packages gstreamer a bit different than the way gstreamer is officially released.  So I am trying to understand this because I have to now start managing my own gstreamer libraries built from your official  tar balls.  

I started by purging all of the currently installed gstreamer-related packages.   gstreamer-1.8.0.tar.xz extracted, built, and installed without any issues.

When configuring  gst-plugins-base-1.8.0 to build, it listed some plugins that have external dependencies that will be built, and a list of those plugins that have external dependencies that will not be built.

Question #1: Is there a way to determine what those external dependencies are for a particular plugin element?   For example, in my case, xvimagesink will not be built because of these external dependencies.

The packaging for debian jessie has a separate package called gstreamer-x and I am assuming that package would have those dependencies. But I do not want to re-install that debian package until I understand the dependencies better and so be assured there will not be any conflicts.

Question #2: What is the significance of the Orc libs for building the plugins?  When building the plugins, I get a log that says that it configured for building without Orc and seems to imply that there will be a performance hit because of the lack of the Orc libs.  I have never use the Orc libs and so know nothing about that lib. So please advise on whether I should install and build gstreamer with Orc.

Thanks,
-Andres

[Sebastian Dröge-3]

On Di, 2016-04-12 at 18:37 -0700, Andres Gonzalez wrote:

> Hi, 
>
> I have been using version 1.4.4 on a debian jessie box. All of the gstreamer
> libraries were installed using the regular apt-get packages that debian
> supplies. However, I now want to start using the latest 1.8 version and so I
> cannot rely on debian to provide the most recent packages.  It appears that
> debian packages gstreamer a bit different than the way gstreamer is
> officially released.  So I am trying to understand this because I have to
> now start managing my own gstreamer libraries built from your official  tar
> balls.  

I would start with the official Debian packages for 1.8.0, which are
available since the day of release. With some minor changes you should
be able to build these also on jessie, and you have the advantage that
you don't have a second GStreamer installation, and also don't replace
your system installation with something not from packages.

> When configuring  gst-plugins-base-1.8.0 to build, it listed some plugins
> that have external dependencies that will be built, and a list of those
> plugins that have external dependencies that will not be built.
>
> Question #1: Is there a way to determine what those external dependencies
> are for a particular plugin element?   For example, in my case, xvimagesink
> will not be built because of these external dependencies. 

The README might explain it, but in the end the only authoritative
information is the configure.ac.

On Debian,
  apt-get build-dep gst-plugins-base1.0
will help you with installing all required dependencies. This is then
based on the information of the debian/control file in the source
package.

> The packaging for debian jessie has a separate package called gstreamer-x
> and I am assuming that package would have those dependencies. But I do not
> want to re-install that debian package until I understand the dependencies
> better and so be assured there will not be any conflicts.

The Debian packaging uses the same source packages as released by the
GStreamer project. The resulting binaries are split into separate
binary packages though to a) stay according with Debian policies
(separate library, tools and development files packages) and b) to not
have a huge set of dependencies (why would you need X11 to use
GStreamer?).

> Question #2: What is the significance of the Orc libs for building the
> plugins?  When building the plugins, I get a log that says that it
> configured for building without Orc and seems to imply that there will be a
> performance hit because of the lack of the Orc libs.  I have never use the
> Orc libs and so know nothing about that lib. So please advise on whether I
> should install and build gstreamer with Orc.

ORC is needed for assembly optimizations of many elements, e.g.
converters. Without, things will run a bit slower.

--
Sebastian Dröge, Centricular Ltd · http://www.centricular.com


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[Andres Gonzalez]

Thanks Sebastian for your helpful response.

You mentioned that debian packages were available for the 1.8 release. However, on the debian site for jessie packages, they appear to still be at version 1.4.4, so I went ahead and built from your recent 1.8 tarballs. It's always easier/faster dealing with official packages, but I still felt I needed to be familiar with the raw build process so I can more easily stay in sync with your official releases manually if required. So the time spent today playing with configure/make/apt-get is well worth it to me.

I just found a useful resource and thought it might be of help to others if they are building from the tarballs:

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/index.html

Scroll down the page; they have a section for Multimedia Libraries which includes GStreamer. They reference the most recent 1.8 release of GStreamer and list the dependencies for the various tarballs/plugins. I wish I had seen this before I started building from the tarballs--it contains useful dependency information that lets you know up front what to expect when building from the tarballs.  Hopefully that link can be of use to others who want to build from the tarballs.

-Andres

[Andres Gonzalez]

Update:

I just found the debian packages for release 1.8.  They were in the testing section for "stretch" which is the next release after jessie.  I had only looked at the stable jessie packages which is still at the 1.4.4 release.

-Andres

[Sebastian Dröge-3]

On Mi, 2016-04-13 at 18:15 -0700, Andres Gonzalez wrote:
> Thanks Sebastian for your helpful response.
>
> You mentioned that debian packages were available for the 1.8 release.
> However, on the debian site for jessie packages, they appear to still be at
> version 1.4.4, so I went ahead and built from your recent 1.8 tarballs. It's
> always easier/faster dealing with official packages, but I still felt I
> needed to be familiar with the raw build process so I can more easily stay
> in sync with your official releases manually if required. So the time spent
> today playing with configure/make/apt-get is well worth it to me.

Debian does not upgrade any packages in stable releases (e.g. jessie)
except for security relevant or really severe bugs. It definitely does
not update to newer major releases of anything.

The 1.8 packages are in Debian unstable and testing, and you can find
them here:
https://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gstreamer1.0.html
(and gst-plugins-base/good/bad/ugly1.0, etc).

It might make sense to get 1.8 into the Debian backports for jessie,
but I don't have the time for that currently.

--
Sebastian Dröge, Centricular Ltd · http://www.centricular.com

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