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Comment by kiwijamo | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question: Are there any actual examples of giant companies using gstreamer?

Why I ask is that pretty much the only reason I have gstreamer installed on my pesonal laptop is to satisfy certain GNOME dependencies (due to GNOME, understandably, dogfooding its own stuff). Everything else (including apps I use daily e.g. mpv, Firefox, etc) depends on ffmpeg.

  $ sudo pacman -Rs gstreamer 
  checking dependencies...
  error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
  :: removing gstreamer breaks dependency 'gstreamer' required by cheese
  :: removing gstreamer breaks dependency 'gstreamer' required by gnome-shell
  :: removing gstreamer breaks dependency 'gstreamer' required by gst-plugins-base-libs
  :: removing gstreamer breaks dependency 'gstreamer' required by libcheese
  :: removing gstreamer breaks dependency 'gstreamer' required by webkit2gtk
  :: removing gstreamer breaks dependency 'gstreamer' required by webkit2gtk-4.1

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I have used gstreamer for the Dutch Railways, to stream the announcements to passengers in certain types of rolling stock. The announcements are generated as text, go through a text-to-speech engine and are then streamed to the rolling stock. As you'd expect, every manufacturer uses a different method to broadcast the announcement.

Which text to speech engine are you using, if I may ask?

I believe this was a commercial engine from Acapela.

RDK is the firmware used on a wide variety of set-top boxes, routers, and IoT devices: https://rdkcentral.com/

The core media pipeline is almost all gstreamer, ffmpeg, and just because I think it’ll surprise some people, Wayland.

I work at a company acquired by Motorola Solutions and we use gstreamer, but I don't know about MSI overall, just our division. We also use ffmpeg for some things, lol.

Overall, they do not use gstreamer. You guys are the outliers. :)

Don't know if you'd consider them giant, but a former colleague tells me that Pexip uses Gstreamer for video-wrangling. (Hearsay, admittedly)

gstreamer is ubiquitous in research labs that depend on video - extremely common

NVidia uses it a lot on their Jetson platform.

Yes. It’s embedded in a surprisingly large number of embedded devices.

Yes. On Windows actually :)

Debian is not the best maintained distro.

Debian doesn’t use pacman. Odds are it was Arch (though pacman has been ported to other platforms).

It was indeed Arch. Not sure about the comment about Debian as IIRC it's more or less the same in Debian. Using gstreamer seems to be more of a GNOME thing than anything to do with distros.

Debian tried to switch from ffmpeg to libav. It didn't turn out well.

But it generally gives me no trouble.

Could you give more details on how it did not turn out well?

As I recall, they were not able to maintain feature, and maybe bug-fix, parity with ffmpeg.

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