Musharaf was in Karachi the last two days. I am glad he was here cause I normally don't have to walk this much. You must be thinking what has Musharaf's visit to khi to do with my walking long distances. It's because the whole road was blocked to let him pass easily and safely. My western friends should not be disappointed to hear this as they know how important he is :-P

Things have started to settle down a bit now. I have a phone line, a table and a chair.

Gstreamer

As it was Sunday today, I got some time to hack on the plugins I am working on. Both elements are quite near to completion now. I was able to optimize the aavideo2text (which would be the actual name of aafilter) by writing my own code to do the escaping of markup text. Now it takes 1 milliseconds which is quite better than 32 milliseconds at least. This should work perfectly for videos <= 1000 fps (Am i right?).

Unfortunately, pipeline still is quite slow. Upon investigation i came to know that the culprit was gdk_draw_layout. It takes about 50 milliseconds for drawing a layout of ~2000 chars (80 * 25) on a 320x240 pixels wide pixbuf. Now how the hell would i optimize this? Don't tell me i need to write my own version of this function. :(