Mandriva: KDE4 Phonon Backend

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2008-11-03 at 20:17 +1100, Seb Ruiz wrote:
> Dear Adam,
> 
> I am writing to you on behalf of the Amarok development team to
> beseech you to consider changing the default KDE 4 Phonon backend from
> GStreamer to Xine. In recent weeks it has become apparent to us that
> the Phonon-GStreamer implementation suffers from a number of fallacies
> which severely degrades the user experience of both our application
> and your distribution.
> 
> Some notable side effects of using the GStreamer backend include:
> frequent crashing, unpredictable track progression, inability to play
> files with certain characters.
> 
> We also understand that even if you would like to use Xine, you may be
> unable to due to technical, political, philosophical or a number of
> other reasons which are neither here nor there. In this case we would
> like to ask you to consider investing a small amount of your resources
> into improving the Phonon GStreamer backend. The benefits to this
> would be multifold, providing a superior experience to users of
> Amarok, KDE and Mandriva.
> 
> Best regards,

Hi, Seb. I'm not sure why you're writing to me, as I'm not involved with
KDE maintenance at all (and I'm afraid I personally run GNOME :>). But
thanks for the mail, and believe me, as the Bugmaster / community
manager, I am painfully aware of a bunch of those bugs.

I believe we selected gstreamer as the default back-end due to our
preference for Codeina as a method for providing restricted codecs.
There's no practical alternative to Codeina; of course there are
third-party repositories where unlicensed codecs for various things can
be downloaded for Xine, but we can't officially be seen to have anything
to do with that. Codeina allows us to offer these codecs in a more
elegant way.

For what it's worth, I believe - though, see above, my position
shouldn't hold much currency - that it would be best for KDE to just
pick one backend and make it work; the split between Xine and Gstreamer
seems to be somewhat arbitrary and political in nature, and hurting KDE
from both ends. As far as I can see, almost all the problems in the
phonon-gstreamer backend are bugs in the backend itself, not in
gstreamer.

I'm frankly not sure we have any resources available to devote to
improving phonon-gstreamer; our KDE team is already heavily stretched
trying to support and patch KDE 4.1 in 2009 while implementing KDE 4.2
in Cooker (and people still want us to fix bugs in KDE 3.5.10...) But
that's up to them, and the management, to decide.

I am CCing this mail to some of our KDE team, and to Anne and Fred for
direction. Can you guys please consider Seb's requests? Thanks.
-- 
adamw