GStreamer: media streaming in Squeak

by John McIntosh

GStreamer is a GPL library that allows the construction of graphs of media-handling components, ranging from simple Ogg/Vorbis playback to complex audio (mixing) and video (non-linear editing) processing. Applications can take advantage of advances in codec and filter technology transparently. Developers can add new codecs and filters by writing a simple plugin with a clean, generic interface, this new codec is now available to the GStreamer system user without integration issues.

This talk will show the audience how to interact with the GStreamer system using a plugin written for the Squeak environment that gives the ability for the developer to decode common media forms, control the playback of the media from a variety of sources, and to generate media from Squeak created audio and video sources by assembling a GStreamer pipeline to process streams of media.

This work was funded by Viewpoints Research Institute to provide a free open source media player for the eToys environment on the OLPC.

Bio: John McIntosh lives on Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, Canada. He is maintainer of the macintosh Squeak VM. For the past four years, he has also been a member of the team responsible for building the Sophie multimedia content creation tool. As a past speaker at ESUG and Smalltalk Solutions conferences, he is well-known for his expertise on Garbage Collection issues, VisualWorks tuning, and contributions to the Squeak Community.

Video: Youtube