Reply to Media Options for KDE 4

[Stefan Westerfeld]

   Hi!

On Tue, Feb 25, 2003 at 11:34:58AM +0100, Marco Lohse wrote:
> Tim Jansen just pointed out that there is a discussion about the 
> multimedia framework for KDE 4 and asked me to comment on some points 
> related to our project called NMM. I will first comment on the questions 
> from Neil Stevens
> 
>  >NMM (http://www.networkmultimedia.org/):

I think this is a good example why KDE4 should _not_ get as muched involved
in choosing one and only one media framework.

There is GStreamer, aRts, NMM and maybe also Xine and MPlayer. Some of these
have their own middleware, their own object model, are implemented in C, in
C++, and so on.

Only time will show which media framework suits best for which tasks, there
is no guarantee that in four years any of these will still be there and/or
actively maintained. KDE4 itself should therefore not choose any of these
over any other, to minimize the risk.

At least I do not feel qualified to make choices that range that far into the
future like the end of the KDE4 lifespan (whereas we do not even know when
the KDE3 lifespan ends).

The same argument also applies to the soundserver, by the way. I think if we
more loosely couple KDE4 to other, large projects (like GStreamer), we are
more flexible than if we tightly couple them.

   Cu... Stefan
-- 
  -* Stefan Westerfeld, stefan at space.twc.de (PGP!), Hamburg/Germany
     KDE Developer, project infos at http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde *-