Port to GStreamer 1.0

[Jason Gerard DeRose]

We're going to be an early and aggressive consumer of GStreamer 1.0, for a number of reasons:

  * 1.0 is making improvements in areas that particularly affect video editing

  * 1.0 is making big improvements on ARM, so is very strategic for us

  * 1.0 is built for introspection, so as we're already using Python3 and PyGI, we'll get better results with 1.0

  * It's the right thing to do as far as being a good citizen in the GStreamer community

  * It allows us to make sure our use cases are getting attention early on

GStreamer 1.0 is going to be released in October, so the port might be able to happen for the Novacut 11.10 release, but perhaps not till 11.11.

As GStreamer 1.0 is parallel installable with 0.10, we can safely deliver 1.0 to Oneiric users through our PPA. I'd also like to get daily GStreamer builds in a PPA going as soon as possible, although perhaps we don't want these going into the Novacut Daily PPA... instead, we should probably use hand picked "stable" snapshots there.

[Jason Gerard DeRose (jderose)]

So an update on this: Novacut is now ported to GStreamer 1.0, save for a few issues.

You'll need to build GStreamer from git, which I explained here:
http://jderose.blogspot.com/2012/07/how-to-run-gstreamer-uninstalled.html

And you'll need to apply my patch to gstreamer for this bug:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=680862

Which you can do with `git am 0001-the-fix.patch`.

After that, things should work quite well, and renders will be done with GStreamer 1.0.

We can't port our thumbnailer to 1.0 till this is fixed:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=678663

The other hold-up is we wont merge this to novacut trunk till we have suitable GStreamer packages available in our PPA. Even though the daily PPA is aimed at developers, we still only commit release-ready code to trunk. And that means we need all the dependencies available as we want to keep our software always easy to consume.

[Jason Gerard DeRose (jderose)]

Oh, and this is the branch with the 1.0 port:

https://code.launchpad.net/~jderose/novacut/gst-1.0

This tentative port I did at the hackfest was sort of a dead end as lots had changed in our PyGST backend in the mean time, but I'm leaving it for historical reference as it might be useful for someone porting to 1.0:

https://code.launchpad.net/~jderose/novacut/gst0.11