Phonon mp3 problems

[Colin Guthrie]

Jeff Mitchell wrote:
> Dr. Diesel wrote:
>> Ok, thanks, that is defiantly my problem.  No
>> documentation/README/Install says anything about zine, I thought Phonon
>> was a completely new backend!  Hence I purposely did not install zine!
> 
> Phonon *is* a completely new backend  :-)

But in the greatest traditions of KDE's love for layers, Phonon itself 
has backends.... and one of those backends is a Xine one!

This may sound like unnecessary abstraction but from a Qt4 perspective 
(and by extension from a KDE4 on Win/OSX perspective) it is necessary to 
have a simple media API on all platforms. While it is theortically 
possible to have a single backend for all platforms (e.g. based on vlc 
or gstreamer), the easiest solution is to make it pluggable. On windows 
there is a DirectSomething backend and on OSX there is a QuickTime backend.

On linux things are sadly a bit more complex in that there are *two* 
backends... IMO it would have made more sense to just have one on Linux 
and concentrate on making it not suck, but sadly that's not how it's 
playing out. IMO the gstreamer backend is the most sensible as gstreamer 
is a library specifically designed to fit into this kind of framework 
and it's the one the Qt team initially choose. There is also a KDE xine 
backend and neither backend is perfect. Time will tell what will be the 
best option here. Having hacked a little on the gstreamer backend to 
make it not suck, I hope it will get some more love soon and ultimately 
kill off the kderuntime xine one. Keeping the primary backend pure-Qt is 
important IMO.

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

Day Job:
   Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/]
Open Source:
   Mandriva Linux Contributor [http://www.mandriva.com/]
   PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/]
   Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]