Mandriva: KDE4 Phonon Backend

[Seb Ruiz]

2008/11/4 Adam Williamson <awilliamson at mandriva.com>:
> 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.

Hi Adam,

Thanks for the reply. I contacted you after a less fruitful attempt to
find the most appropriate person - as a community manager I hoped that
you could at least forward the email to the correct people (you have,
thanks!).

>
> 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.

Yes, this is true - the bugs are in the backend.

>
> 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.

No problems, to be honest, I expected most of your answers, but still
felt it was important to notify you of the problems that it causes all
of us.

Many thanks

Seb

-- 
Seb Ruiz

http://www.sebruiz.net/
http://amarok.kde.org/