request for phonon API addition

[Matthias Kretz]

On Thursday 01 November 2007, Kevin Krammer wrote:
> > Rationale: many apps that don't care for KDE don't care for the category
> > (as it doesn't make much sense to them anyway).
>
> I afraid I don't get this part of the rationale.
> As far as I understand Categories have nothing (directly) to do with KDE
> but rather with user experience, e.g. automatically reduced notification
> volume when media playback occurs.

True. That's the theory. But without KDE there's currently no way to make 
those categories behave any different on Win and Mac. Meaning it makes 0 
difference whether your app uses CommunicationCategory or MusicCategory on 
Windows which has no equivalents for this.

Perhaps Vista has something that comes closer to this, but so far I've not 
learned of anything in the Windows configuration that would influence Phonon 
at this point wrt categories.

> I assume the context of the above statement are Qt-using non-KDE
> application, but, if I take Skype as an example, I'd still expect it to use
> CommunicationCategory, especially since it's well known to be a Qt
> application.

Yes, Skype cares for KDE (in contrast to some in-house app that is confined to 
one platform) and for them it's easy to identify the category to use.

> > Patch attached. Comments (also to the name of the category) are welcome.
>
> Since all the other values are "named", what about GenericCategory?

app is categorized as Music, Video, Notification, ..., Generic

or

app is categorized as Music, Video, Not... or not categorized

This again only makes a difference with KDE but the thing is this category 
doesn't show up explicitly in either the Phonon KCM or the Audio Mixer (where 
still no categories show up at the moment at all :-( )

Actually I'm thinking of something like this:

Backend defines initial preference of devices. This is used for all audio 
outputs.

Phonon KCM can reorder the default preference of devices (not tied to any 
category - affects all audio outputs then).

Phonon KCM can reorder the preference of devices per category. It then affects 
only the audio outputs for the given category.

This would also solve the problem of having to reorder 6 lists of devices. 
Remaining problem is a good UI for it...

-- 
________________________________________________________
Matthias Kretz (Germany)                            <><
http://Vir.homelinux.org/
MatthiasKretz at gmx.net, kretz at kde.org,
Matthias.Kretz at urz.uni-heidelberg.de
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