Gstreamer-based programs need gst-plugins-faad to play back files containing AAC streams. (m4a, but also Youtube videos in Totem) Please add a dependency on gst-plugins-faad to gst-plugins-meta. Given that the aac USE flag is enabled in desktop profiles, this change would considerably improve media support on default GNOME desktops. Thank you.
I hope this flag will be added soon, swfdec needs aac plugin for playing youtube, I prefer to have one meta package for gstreamer plugins in my world file. P.S. Why there are no USE flags for these plugins? most of them are stable: for p in `ls -d media-plugins/gst-plugins-*`;do grep -qR $p media-plugins/gst-plugins-meta/||echo $p;done media-plugins/gst-plugins-amrnb media-plugins/gst-plugins-amrwb media-plugins/gst-plugins-annodex media-plugins/gst-plugins-cdio media-plugins/gst-plugins-cdparanoia media-plugins/gst-plugins-faac media-plugins/gst-plugins-faad media-plugins/gst-plugins-farsight media-plugins/gst-plugins-gconf media-plugins/gst-plugins-gio media-plugins/gst-plugins-gnomevfs media-plugins/gst-plugins-jpeg media-plugins/gst-plugins-ladspa media-plugins/gst-plugins-libmms media-plugins/gst-plugins-libpng media-plugins/gst-plugins-libvisual media-plugins/gst-plugins-mimic media-plugins/gst-plugins-modplug media-plugins/gst-plugins-musepack media-plugins/gst-plugins-neon media-plugins/gst-plugins-pango media-plugins/gst-plugins-pulse media-plugins/gst-plugins-raw1394 media-plugins/gst-plugins-resindvd media-plugins/gst-plugins-schroedinger media-plugins/gst-plugins-shout2 media-plugins/gst-plugins-sidplay media-plugins/gst-plugins-soup media-plugins/gst-plugins-speex media-plugins/gst-plugins-twolame media-plugins/gst-plugins-v4l media-plugins/gst-plugins-v4l2 media-plugins/gst-plugins-wavpack media-plugins/gst-plugins-x264 media-plugins/gst-plugins-ximagesrc
gst-plugins-meta is not a dump ground for all possible plugins. If some specific application needs some plugin it better provide an USE flag on its own for that in my opinion. Also we need missing-plugins support, not 50 USE flags on a meta package. The meta package is an interim solution that has been overloaded for too many things imho
The long series of request to add more flags onto the metapackage shows that separating the gst plugins was a bad idea.. Users want most (ie almost all) of the plugins, not just a few.
Mart, Olivier, look at x11-base/xorg-server and x11-base/xorg-drivers: when x11-base/xorg-server had USE flags for all drivers in it's ebuild we recompiled it when we changed VIDEO_CARDS or INPUT_DEVICES, xorg-server files after rebuilding were the same, but we wasted time for compiling. Now the solution is right and elegant. I think gstreamer packages must be done the same way: totem => gst-plugins-meta => plugins When I want to add support for aac to my system why should I recompile all gstreamer plugins and all players or other packages that use gstreamer if after rebuilding their files will not change? I think that the best solution will be gst-plugins-meta with USE for everything (like xorg-drivers) with removing codec related USE flags from packages that depends on gstreamer. Do not forget that gstreamer is abstraction layer. P.S. 50 USE flags is not a lot ;) $ equery u vlc|grep -c '' 101 $ equery u mplayer|grep -c '' 108
(In reply to comment #3) > The long series of request to add more flags onto the metapackage shows that > separating the gst plugins was a bad idea.. > Why recompile the whole gst-plugins-bad or gst-plugins-ugly just for a tiny support in it ? I meant separating the gst plugins is great, imho. The problem will be the same, there would be a lot of USE-flags for gst-plugins-{bad,ugly}...
The most common case is not adding a new plugin, it is upgrading. The split plugins make upgrade a lot slower (since configure has to be run 80 million times). Also, the tests can not be used on the split plugins.
Just chiming in. When Gilles and I dove into gst plugins a few weeks ago, we found out that the "bad" collection not only builds (de)muxers and codec plugins, but also general purpose libraries and elements that are used by other elements. For example /usr/lib/libgstbasevideo-0.10.so and /usr/lib/libgstsignalprocessor.so. Both of which will be rebuilt for each and every plugin ebuild based on -bad. My 2¢
/usr/lib/libgstbasevideo-0.10.so and /usr/lib/libgstsignalprocessor.so rebuilding was a simple bug long fixed. Anyhow, how about working towards a gst-plugins-video-meta and gst-plugins-audio-meta for cases where applications rely on auto-plugging with playbin? Then aac support would be force enabled through a USE flag on gst-plugins-audio-meta, etc
*** Bug 308995 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 325797 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I think we should just add all these USE flags (many bugs for different ones) for gst-plugins-meta if its maintainers agree (I don't consider myself a maintainer of this beast). We can deal with my concerns, which lead to this inaction here, in the new gstreamer metas that are in the works - eventually leading to migrating away from gst-plugins-meta and this three dozen of USE flags situation, so it shouldn't matter much if we have five more USE flags on this one now or not.
And I of course meant the USE flags that make most sense. Perhaps aac, musepack, pulse, few other decoders, libmms
I agree. Any objections?
For lack of a better solution, it's fine with me :)
Something definitely should change. I had my first experience about 2 weeks ago with installing gnome 2.30; I built totem, and had USE flags such as "aac", "mpeg", and others in my make.conf. To my surprise, totem could not play a video file with AAC audio out of the box. I downloaded a sample .mpeg file online, and that wouldn't play either. It turns out I had to cherry pick some *very* non-obvious (to me, but maybe I'm slow :-) ) gst plugins to make this work. Personally, I think the split causes much more confusion than it's worth, but that's not appropriate here; *if* the split is preferred by the maintainer, at least make it work. As it is, it's horribly situated to be very cryptic to non-multimedia gurus. Further, having to add various plugins to my world file feels quite dirty. So, if a clean solution can't be integrated, perhaps it's time to ditch the split.
Andrew, the current GStreamer maintainers are not inclined to go back to the monolithic way of doing things. While I understand your frustration with having to dig through the plugins list to make your media work, having actual details of the which plugin(s) you had to manually install (perhaps examine the world file) and details of the media that didn't work would be a lot more helpful to actually fixing the problem.
(In reply to comment #16) > Andrew, the current GStreamer maintainers are not inclined to go back to the > monolithic way of doing things. While I understand your frustration with having > to dig through the plugins list to make your media work, having actual details > of the which plugin(s) you had to manually install (perhaps examine the world > file) and details of the media that didn't work would be a lot more helpful to > actually fixing the problem. > As mentioned in comment #1, -faad is required for aac, but wasn't pulled in via. my USE=aac flag set globally. I can't recall exactly which was needed for the latter of my issues, as at this point, I didn't have time to examine and research proper support, and ended up installing nearly all of them. I don't mind the split builds, but to me, they should line up global USE flags. Are the proposed -{audio,video}-meta files viewable any place? I'd love to help test them, but not sure I'm multimedia-savvy enough to create them on my own.
Sorry, not in a public place right now, they were circulated in gnome and gstreamer mail aliases, so their team members inboxes. We will be reviewing and dealing with those metas with Ford_Prefect later this week, and I'll make sure we move towards posting them up to a public place this week then, if not in the tree yet. Meanwhile as I proposed, this catch-all gst-plugins-meta meta should get this aac and some other USE flags until its phased out, so one wouldn't have these common issues until the new metas are finished and fully migrated to.
I was looking at adding aac, but gst-plugins-faad and gst-plugins-faac are not sufficiently keyworded, and it does not appear that arm/hppa/ia64/sh have the appropriate USE flags masked.
+*gst-plugins-meta-0.10-r5 (27 Jan 2011) + + 27 Jan 2011; Pacho Ramos <pacho@gentoo.org> -gst-plugins-meta-0.10.ebuild, + -gst-plugins-meta-0.10-r3.ebuild, +gst-plugins-meta-0.10-r5.ebuild: + Add more USE flags for aac, musepack and others requested by people in bugs + until better metas are developed. Remove old. (this solved original problem, about the rest of discussion, Ford Prefect is working on future metas that will improve current situation)
