try newer gstreamer win32 builds

[totaam]

Issue migrated from trac ticket # 299

component: platforms | priority: critical | resolution: wontfix | keywords: win32

2013-03-21 02:59:34: antoine created the issue

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In order to solve #297 reliably and to get opus support (#246), we probably need a better/newer build of gstreamer, it doesn't hurt to try.

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The ossbuild downloads are stuck in March 2011 and it seems like the project is completely dead.
Maybe these 0.10 builds are more up to date? (latest from March 2012 - slightly better)

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Alternatively, we could try porting it to gstreamer 1.0, but I think this is going to be a lot of work: we cannot use gtk2 as the new gstreamer/pygst bindings use gobject introspection.

[totaam]

2013-03-21 11:38:45: antoine changed status from new to closed

[totaam]

2013-03-21 11:38:45: antoine changed resolution from ** to wontfix

[totaam]

2013-03-21 11:38:45: antoine commented

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OK, I want to make a release sooner rather than later so I've tried it myself and this looks like a no-go.
Here's how:

• download all the latest builds and extract them into C:\gstreamer-0.10-win32. Warning: DO NOT ever use C:\gstreamer which is a "magic" path hardcoded somewhere in the win32 builds of gstreamer...
• change the path to gstreamer in win32/MAKE-INSTALLER.BAT to match the new location:

-SET GSTREAMER=C:\Program Files\OSSBuild\GStreamer\v0.10.7
+SET GSTREAMER=C:\gstreamer-0.10-win32

• copy the python bindings from the ossbuild tree to the new binary tree (dirty..), we only need:

sdk\bindings\python\v2.7\lib\gstreamer-0.10
sdk\bindings\python\v2.7\lib\site-packages

(the directory structure must be preserved to minimize the changes to the BAT file)

• run the build and notice some errors about missing DLLs..
• copy all the DLLs from bin to the xpra installation directory, and all the DLLs from lib/gstreamer-0.10 to gstreamer-0.10 in xpra's installation directory

Unfortunately the resulting .exe just hangs silently (looks like a DLL-hell issue), so we probably need to build the python bindings from source, against the headers from this latest build.. And that is totally non-trivial since you need a lot of headers to build (python headers, gtk headers, etc .. as well as the gstreamer headers, ideally all via pkgconfig). If possible, a cross build from Linux may well be an easier option.

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The only real way forward is to sort out the win32 build completely... by not using the horror that is MS Windows as a build environment, see #300