I've been warned by a number of Linux folk to avoid GStreamer.
Sure, you can avoid Gstreamer, no one will force to use that. What I am surprised about - and why I write this reply, usually I am in reading mode of this very useful mailing list - that Gstreamer gets so much badmouthing not even caring to check out lastest progress. About using Gstreamer playing music and watching videos - well, I do this both home and work, and no gliches, no artifacts, no problems with Dapper, Edgy and Feisty (Using Gstreamer 0.10 and all aviable plugins). What I love about Gstreamer is that it brings unified way to "doing things" in multimedia and and it is very easy to structure how multimedia works in your application (Pipelines owns). Well, of course, I can play multimedia also without any Gstreamer, but there must be some reason why Nokia uses Gstreamer for playing their multimedia on 770 and N800. Why GNOME uses Gstreamer as backend for multimedia apps. It is not forced for you to use Gstreamer, but I would suggest to at least try last stable version to judge it. Gstreamer0.10 even has pitddl and ffmpeg elements aviable for install in Ubuntu /Debian repositories for those who wants to use 32-bit dll hacs or ffmpeg library. For one I can agree that Gstreamer came rather long way. It was very barerly usable for videos with Totem/Gstreamer0.8, and RB had lot of quirks with migration over Gstreamer0.10. However, this have changed very much thanks to hard work of community. In fact, it is second most active community besides JACK. So, Gstreamer gets taken seriously more and more each day. It is suitable for your use? It is your choice. I say - try it, because I think it is quite changed from the last time guys which gave you their recomendations tried it.
