what to do with phonon & why aren't you using it?

[Harald Sitter]

Hola!

Why don't you use phonon?

What would it make it useful?

What do you reckon we should do with it?

A bit of background perhaps: waaaay back when phonon was conceived as
multimedia abstraction library to serve as multimedia pillar. While it
is certainly abstract and a library I'm not so sure about the pillar
aspect ;) In fact, phonon is barely even an abstraction since I only
maintain the vlc backend and nobody else maintains any other backend.
So, one has to wonder if it'd not make more sense to put the bit of
energy that flows into phonon to instead go into qtvlc and not have to
deal with the abstraction element at all. Indeed all these
abstractions seem a bit silly because the multimedia libraries
gstreamer and vlc are already abstractions... it's nesting dolls all
the way down.
With all that in mind I was prototyping a revisit of the API many
years ago. Away from complicated mediagraph pipeline building
abstraction to simple player abstraction (you have a player, you give
it a url, it plays the url, that's it), as indeed that seems to be
what most remaining users want to do these days - hassle free
playback. Perhaps that is a path to take? But then the question
remains, do we need the abstraction at all?

Any and all thoughts welcome.

HS