Phonon oddities

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Leonardo Franchi at 22/04/09 11:57 did gyre and gimble:
> On Wednesday 22 April 2009 09:34:37 Colin Guthrie wrote:
>> 'Twas brillig, and Andrew Stromme at 21/04/09 23:38 did gyre and gimble:
>>> Yet another PulseAudio <---> Phonon conflict. Why am I not surprised....
>>> I wish there were a way to determine exactly what's conflicting/going
>>> wrong in these cases.
>> It's generally the engine in question's fault really. The Xine engine,
>> which seems to be favoured (although I strongly disagree with it on
>> principle - Qt started gstreamer engine (where gstreamer is a library
>> pretty much perfectly suited to a phonon backend) but no one in KDE land
>> seemed to want to work with it), but it's Pulse support is nowhere near
>> as good as the gstreamer system. The pulse and gstreamer communities
>> work very well together.
> 
> When the gstreamer engine stops sucking, we'll stop telling people to use 
> xine. Sure, in theory it may be better, but when users come to us saying 
> amarok can't play music, or is skipping tracks, or ${insert random behaviour 
> here}, and switching to the xine phonon engines fixes it, we have no reason to 
> tell people to use gst.

Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that the gstreamer engine didn't suck or 
that Xine engine as a workaround for that suckiness was a bad option etc.

I was really just lamenting that the "solution" to the gstreamers 
engines suckiness when Qt landed it many moons ago was to replace it 
with a xine engine rather than to make it work properly.

Different engines in phonon is a valid idea, it means it can work cross 
platform with a QT engine on OSX (or whatever it uses, I'm not really 
sure) and a directx one on Windows (ditto) etc., but on Linux there 
seems to be three now :s I'm all for the freedom that this provides, but 
I'd rather one fully-working, input-output capable engine on Linux 
rather than three half-working engines.

It's just annoying that I don't have more time to spend on this. I have 
spent several hours patching and hacking on both the xine and gstreamer 
engines and it's not fun :(

Col



-- 

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

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