This Week in GNOME: #186 Media Parsing
Quoting: #186 Media Parsing · This Week in GNOME —
The LocalSearch filesystem extractor is switching from GStreamer to ffmpeg / libav for media file parsing in the next major release. GStreamer served us well for almost 20 years in this role as a media parsing library, but it was designed for media playback and not fast metadata extraction. It’s plugin support meant that it behaves differently depending which plugins are installed on a given system, which makes it impossible to fully test. The last few years saw the LocalSearch metadata extractor gain much better sandboxing, but due to the way GStreamer loads plugins, we had to poke several holes in the sandbox to make it work, and play a whack-a-mole game to blocklist any GStreamer plugins that wouldn’t work in the sandbox.
The new ffmpeg-based implementation is faster, and also safer due to tighter sandboxing. It supports all the media formats we need to parse, and in fact, on most systems GStreamer was already processing many filetypes using libav. Thanks to Carlos Garnacho for the merge request.