20 Mai

While trying to complete my video / media inspector demo program (in Python of course), I got sidetracked playing with Gnonlin. Gnonlin is a plug-in for Gstreamer which helps layout and prioritize video and audio clips on a timeline. It was designed to help people like me make non-linear video / audio editors. So, I figured I better go ahead and get familiar with gnonlin, and use it in my media inspector program.

So far, I feel like I've taken a few steps back. I have an example using just Gstreamer which combines 2 audio files (including MP3 files). Both songs play at the same time (which sounds crazy), but it works none-the-less.

I retrofitted that code to use gnonlin instead of just Gstreamer, and it still doesn't work. It only plays 1 of the audio files (the one with the highest priority). And to top it off, it won't work with MP3 files... just WAV and OGG files. Grrrrrrr.

Here is a screenshot (found on this blog) of how gnonlin works. As you can see, it let's us layout our clips in a timeline fashion (via code... not a gui), and then it does the hard work of converting this into a gstreamer bin, which as you know is just another gstreamer element. We then have to add this bin to our pipeline, and use a dynamic pad to hook up the bin with the rest of our pipeline (but more on that later).


I am trying to contact someone (anyone) who can help me solve the riddle of gnonlin, so that I can have a working gnonlin python example to share with everyone. I've been living in the #gstreamer IRC channel on FreeNode's server... but no luck yet.