multimedia infrastructure

[Neil Stevens]

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On Monday December 30, 2002 07:26, Florin Andrei wrote:
> That's why i think, at this moment, the thing that makes sense is to
> have a multimedia library backend, with an API that can be called from
> pretty much any application or core component, to offer "multimedia
> player" services.

We have one.  It's called aRts.

> For example, if you have libpng on your system, any application can do
> stuff with PNG files. How about having such a library that does things
> like "play this AVI file for me", or something like that?...

We have one.  It's called aRts.  And on top of aRts we have more than one 
KDE-ish wrapper to it.  At a lower level we have libartskde providing 
conveniences for direct aRts coding.  Higher up we have the KMediaPlayer 
interface (implemented by Kaboodle) that plays files.  Even higher we have 
KNotify for UI-logical sound playing.

You'll notice, for example, that Konqueror previews don't require their own 
set of media support.  Konqueror uses aRts.  Same with games in kdegames.

> Have a look at this site:
>
> http://xinehq.de/

We have a Xine plugin to aRts in KDE 3.1.

Not that we're tied to Xine.  People can write any other plugins they want, 
to support their preferred video code.

> The very notion of "multimedia player" gets diluted somewhat into the
> whole collection of applications for which multimedia capabilities make
> sense. Of course, a multimedia GUI should be provided, for user's
> convenience, but the capabilities could be implemented everywhere.

Well, yes, multimedia GUIs can be a lot better than most people implement 
them.  KDE in particular should have a high standard of GUI 
qualifications.  Fortunately our major apps (Kaboodle and Noatun) both 
have UIs that act like normal KDE apps.  And they can be apps optimized 
for one purpose or another only because we have a common service aRts 
shared between them.

> What do you think?

I think your mind and heart's in the right place, and I hope you'll study 
what we already have in kdemultimedia. :-)

- -- 
Neil Stevens - neil at qualityassistant.com
"The nearest I can make it out, 'Love your Enemies' means, 'Hate your
Friends'." - Benjamin Franklin
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