Adding flac-support to kde-multimedia?

Allan Sandfeld Jensen kde at carewolf.com
Sun Sep 7 12:08:05 BST 2003


A few days ago I started trying to solve what I considered a bug in juk; that 
it didnt recognice flac-files as  audio. Solving it was simple, but it turned 
out that we dont have flac-support for arts, so they didnt play.
Therefore I have spend an educational afternoon (and night) writing a 
arts-plugin for flac inspired by the oggvorbis and audiofile-plugins.

Since we went into feature-freeze this week however I am not allowed to commit 
it directly. That's why I am asking for permission here.

It is in three parts:
- flac_artsplugin (done, but stutters a little and needs tweaking)
- kfile_plugin/flac (not started, should be easy since it uses ID3 like mp3)
- mimetype and support in players and juk (partly done)

The pros of having it in kdemultimedia and not in -extragear or -nonbeta, is 
that if support is added in juk and it's mimetype added in kdelibs, users 
might think the files are playable, not knowning it requires an external 
plugin. And if support isnt added in other applications, the external plugin 
wont be of much use anyway. 
Also of interest is that Kaudiocreator already support encoding to flac.

The only con I can think off, is that it breaks the freature-freeze, but since 
the code is mostly done and we are still open for outstanding feature-commit, 
it's hardly a big problem.

Does anyone have any strong emotions about this, or can it be added to the 
feature-plan? 

`Allan




More information about the kde-core-devel mailing list