Okay, this will get very technical so consider yourself warned. I was thinking about posting it in bugs but as we all know jolla won’t do shit about it anyway, so I’m posting here in case someone can circumvent jolla.
Okay strap in kiddos time for history lesson. Back in 2022 (or even earlier) there was an issue. Youtube stopped serving video formats with video and audio in them with resolution higher than 720p (currently they even stopped 720p). So no youtube client on sfos could play 1080p youtube. This could not be circumvented because everyone and their dog is using qtmultimedia which is insanely limited. So there I came, after many months of struggling with gstreamer and droidmedia I’ve created video player in microtube that was working with gstreamer which allowed me to play two strems at once, change playback speed and display subtitles. Sick. Many people seem to forgot about that.
So why do we even need custom player? That’s where’s the heart of the problem. If you want to do hardware acceleration of video encoding/decoding then it has to go through droidvdec (part of gst-droid) and it outputs custom format which has to be manually accepted and thats the custom player.
But what if I told you I didn’t have to do any of this? Because in droidmedia there is converter which converts gst-droid format to standard raw output. And even better droidvdec CAN output raw output!
Okay then why didn’t I use it? Simple. How do you display it? There’s nothing that can act as a video output for gstreamer. Well there is one… and that’s the topic of this post.
If jolla didn’t disable building of qmlglsink for god unknown reason (I don’t want to know, I don’t care), we could use that and then anyone could use gstremer pipleine and I could render subtitles in picoplayer directly in video (currently nothing can modify decoded output cause custom format remember). And then it would also work with software decoders because they also output standard raw output. And all this pain could be avoided…
To be honest I like my monopoly but if we could somehow add qmlglsink, so gstreamer-plugins-good-qt package, that would be sick. Idk how you would go about that, and I’m too busy and jaded to figure it out, hence this post. Have at it.
Year ago I mentioned qmlglsink to mal and he kindly confirmed it’s just disabled. And it wasn’t enabled since.