Re: [9fans] Multimedia on Plan 9

[Roman Shaposhnick <rvs@sun.com>]

On Fri, 2007-06-22 at 10:52 +0100, Steve Simon wrote:
> > It seems like every multimedia component should be a file
> > server with some standart interface
>
> Beware of pushing the file mataphor too far, jpg(1) and tojpg(1) work
> pretty well, as pipelined processes though animated gifs don't fit so well.
>
> This said animated gifs are really short movies so gif -c could output a
> movie clip file (format yet to be defined) rather than a single image file,
> this would fit the model much better...

  Well, you're right. But there's nothing special about gif per se. Gif
happens to be both a container format and a picture codec at the same
time. Handling animated GIFs in that regard should  be no different from
handling AVIs with MPEG4 in them.

  Although Plan9 file model, as nice as it is breaks horribly when
we start talking about HD multimedia content. The performance bottleneck
is quite noticeable at 50MBpbs :-(

Thanks,
Roman.