[KDE/Mac] phonon vs qtmultimedia

[Ian Wadham]

Hi Jeremy,

On 13/01/2015, at 11:49 AM, Jeremy Whiting wrote:
> Fellow mac people, I've got 2 questions re kf5/qt5 applications on OS X.
> 
> 1. How do I build qt5 with the multimedia bits it needs to work? I don't see anything multimedia specific in configure --help output besides -no-pulseaudio. Is there some specific QtMultimedia backend I need to enable somehow for sound to work.
> 
> 2. Is phonon usable on OS X with qt5? phonon itself builds now, but phonon-vlc needed a small change to build and crashes when trying to use it. phonon-quicktime is in unmaintained. Is there a working phonon backend for osx?

I am sorry but I cannot help you with these questions.

Re 1), I could not build anything with Phonon and KDE 4, using kdesrc-build.
Phonon kept building library files that were invalid on Apple OS X (i.e. they
contained relative paths).  So I eventually fell back to using Phonon from
Macports, just to be able to build other stuff (but for Qt4/KDE4 of course).

Re 2), I do not know if Phonon works at all on Apple OS X.  What KDE or Qt
apps use it?  The KDE Games apps I work on do not.  They use OpenAL,
which is readily available on Apple OS X and is better than Phonon at
playing short precisely-timed sounds, as required in games.

VLC works fine on Apple OS X as a media player (front and backend).  I use
it all the time, but I did not get it from MacPorts.

Cheers, Ian W.