Gmerlin architecture changes

It was a long time ago that I wrote something about the latest gmerlin developments. The reason for that is, that most of the time I was too busy coding and too lazy for documenting stuff. For the latter you need a stable architecture and the architecture changes a bit during the development. I usually think a lot before starting coding. But at some point I need to flush my brain and fine tune things later when I have some working applications.

The gmerlin architecture was reworked dramatically with the following goals:

1. Implement generic source and sink connectors for transporting A/V frames and (compressed) packets inside one application. These do automatic format conversion and optimized buffer handling.
2. Change the handling of A/V streams throughout all libraries to use the new connectors. This includes gmerlin-avdecoder as well as the gmerlin plugin API.
3. Implement standalone codec plugins for on-the-fly (de-)compression of A/V streams.
4. Define (yet another) Multimedia container format. It can be used as an on-disk format but also (and more importantly) as a generic pipe format for connecting commandline applications. Think of it as a more generic version of the yuv4mpeg format. It is called gavf.
5. Define an interprocess transport mechanism for gavf streams through pipes or sockets. On machine local connections it can pass A/V frames through shared memory for increased efficiency.
6. Write a bunch of commandline tools for generating and processing gavf streams, which can be connected in every imaginable way on the Unix commandline. This was the ultimate goal I had in my mind :)

Not everything is finished yet. I'll document each of these subprojects in separate posts.