Phonon oddities

[Leonardo Franchi]

On Wednesday 22 April 2009 12:11:24 Colin Guthrie wrote:
> '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 :(

That we can agree on :) Unfortunately we are stretched very thin as it is, and 
we're not xine/gst guys in any case. So we really don't have that much control 
over the quality of the gst engine. That said, we've  been talking with 
QtSoftware and making sure they are aware of the gstreamer bugs (they weren't 
aware of gstreamer engine bugs on the kde bugzilla) so hopefully the quality 
if the engine will slowly rise to a point where we can recommend it again.

leo

-- 
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lfranchi at kde.org		Tufts  University 2010
leonardo.franchi at tufts.edu                The KDE Project