Help wanted to evolve KDEs music players

[Harald Sitter]

On Sun, Aug 2, 2015 at 5:31 PM, Martin Sandsmark
<martin.sandsmark at kde.org> wrote:
> VLC is something that makes more sense for me.

Not disagreeing or anything since it is a well known fact that I am a
VLC fanboy :P

BUT

During last akademy I brought up the possibility of killing
phonon-gstreamer and going vlc-only in Phonon. While this discussion
happened on a private packager list I can not point to it but the gist
of it was that Fedora doesn't have VLC, OpenSUSE has a "crippled" VLC
and Slackware doesn't have any packages and probably will not ever.

KDE Sysadmins raised concerns that we wouldn't be able to provide VLC
in any sort of bundled binary fashion as our mirror network covers
many jurisdictions where VLC might be problematic (not that I think we
would want to distribute binaries containing VLC anyway although it is
very much a possibility with windows/osx I have been told).

Back then we actually outlined ways for Fedora to also ship a crippled
VLC. From what I have heard rumor-wise that went nowhere on account of
red hat not wanting anything even remotely problematic on their
servers, which seems very reasonable considering they are a US based
company. At any rate though a VLC on Fedora will be worse off than a
GStreamer based thing. Unlike GStreamer [1] there is no built-in
runtime installer for VLC right now, so if one were to pursue this and
doesn't want subpar experience on some distributions at the very least
one would also need to craft a plugin installer. And TBH, having silly
installer dialogs pop up when trying to watch porn kinda screws up the
whole experience :P

Anyway, just something more to consider.

[1] http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/doc/gstreamer/head/gst-plugins-base-libs/html/gst-plugins-base-libs-gstpbutilsinstallplugins.html

HS