Fwd: looking for phonon gstreamer maintainer

Harald Sitter sitter at kde.org
Wed Sep 25 15:01:10 BST 2013


On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 3:38 PM, Daniel Nicoletti <dantti12 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have a question:
>
> I had to write a Qt5 app for playing music/video some
> time ago, and I have used QtMultimedia5, so far so good
> QtMultimedia seems to provide everything I needed tho
> it still uses gstreamer 0.10. AFAIK Phonon was created
> due the lack of QtMultimedia, so now that it's there and
> it's maintained shouldn't we drop Phonon, or even better
> why is Phonon still important?
> I googled trying to find their differences but I still have
> this questioning...

It has the most ludicrous API in all of multimedia.
More to the point though Phonon was part of kdelibs4 as such it is
needed to retain compatibility. Less so with frameworks5 though.

Phonon was created because we did not want to bind kdelibs and core
applications to one library we have no control over that then ends up
breaking API (as gstreamer did shortly before that 0.9 -> 0.10), or
falls apart (as arts did), or dies off (as xine did after it had been
the default phonon backend for a while). At the same time there was
need for a general purpose multimedia solution for KDE software, so
Phonon came to be.

Whether qtmultimedia should take that place for qt5 based kde software
I do not know. API-wise I certainly wouldn't want to use it.

HS




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