Record activity for XO-1.5

[Daniel Drake]

On 20 April 2010 19:07, Aleksey Lim <alsroot at member.fsf.org> wrote:
> In my mind, switch to camerabin would be the best way to go. Unfortunately
> camerabin cant work as is on XO-1, it should be patched to let Record
> use two phases encoding and it looks like pretty special in case of
> upstream. But new Record could work on XO-1.5.

OK, I read some more about camerabin and understand now.

camerabin is a gstreamer element which provides the functionality of
showing a video feed, saving it to a file, taking photos, and
recording audio, and it lets you pick-and-mix those elements at your
choosing. It does indeed sound like a good fit for record.

One blocking problem in its current state is that it during video
recording, the only option is for it to encoding theora video and
vorbis audio on-the-fly. This is too much for the XO-1, probably any
low-end system, and possibly even XO-1.5; we need to avoid the
on-the-fly vorbis encoding, saving to wav and then re-encoding later.

Another blocking issue is that it's incomplete-- see this page
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/wiki/CameraBin

So while I agree its a nice looking option, I think it's a 3-step
process for the Record roadmap:

 1. Make a working Record activity without camerabin
 2. Assist camerabin developers in camerabin development until it's
included in gst-plugin-good (or wait for the existing group of
developers to achieve this)
 3. Tweak Record to use camerabin

I'm working on #1 (but probably can't dedicate much more time to this).

Daniel