OpenOffice adopts GStreamer framework to provide better audio/video support on Linux

Have you ever wished to embed a youtube video in an OpenOffice document or wondered if you could prepare a presentation with better integration of multimedia content? Well, the time has come, OpenOffice has adopted the Gstreamer framework to improve multimedia support on Linux.

Gstreamer is a pipelined multimedia framework which enables developers to come up with various multimedia applications. GNOME desktop environment provides it as a default framework since GNOME 2.2 and because of this its been widely adopted in the Linux community.

Ubuntu and its variants have out of the box support for Gstreamer and this has been a deciding factor in its adoption by OpenOffice. "The choice needs to be made just to ensure that we don't have to provide a different backend for all multimedia frameworks that already exist", says Kai Ahrens, in a blog post, "This just doesn't work for resource reasons. So, a framework needs to be chosen that meets the needs of a group of users as large as possible".

Actually they had created a backend earlier which provied the flexibility to extend the set of supported frameworks but once they went through other available frameworks, they decided to build a backend from scratch supporting GStreamer.

There were plans to support Sun's "Java Media Framework" but it was a bit outdated and support for various decoders was not satisfactory. Even if they had worked on improving it, a little manual configuration(from users) was still required to make it work. So, the idea was ultimately dropped.

The new backend supports GStreamer 0.10.17 and above. The backend will be enabled by default, so if you have GStreamer(>= 0.10.17) already installed then it should work out of the box, no need of any extra configuration.

Better Support for media content in OpenOffice was badly needed. It is already a nice alternative to Microsoft Office but this new functionality will certainly give a boost to its user base making it widely adopted and more popular than ever.