Some ideas for the aRts-replacement

[Scott Wheeler]

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On Friday 20 February 2004 11:49, Zack Rusin wrote:
> Just wondering what are people thinking about 
> http://www.networkmultimedia.org . I think it's rather impressive.

I had been meaning to look at it for a while and pulled it down a little while 
earlier.  I did hit at least one build problem where it was including a 
header that it hadn't check for, but after that things built fine.

Good stuff:

The code is pretty nice.  It's C++ and seems pretty readable.  It's more or 
less Qt style code.

It seems that the authors are KDE users and are interested in 

Current concerns:

*) Out of the 4 examples in the mp3dec dir only one of them worked; simpleplay 
specifically would really garble the mp3 for about 10 seconds and then crash.  
This was my first impression.

*) I'd like to hear more about the project goals -- like specifically if the 
developers think that it's realistic for KDE's multimedia system to be on NMM 
and if it's something they're willing to commit to supporting.

*) The developers?  There are quite a few listed, but at least from the looks 
of it they're all at the same Uni and may or may not be committed to the 
project after graduation.  This of course also gives off the impression that 
the goals are more academic than practical; of course I may be wrong.  It 
also seems like (from looking at the site materials) that the system is 
mostly maintained by Marco (again, I may be wrong -- this is just from a 
glance at a few things).  With aRts we had a similar problem in that there 
was really only one person that understood and maintained aRts -- after he 
didn't have the time and/or interestet for that any longer we were in a tough 
spot.

*) At least my first impression is that it's not as mature as other options.   
This is somewhat reinforced by the lack of "real" applications that seem to 
be using it.  I may try porting JuK's relatively simple Player interface to 
it just to get a feel for the API and stability.

*) The development list is pretty inactive and it seems like most of the stuff 
there is really build support and whatnot -- this may be because the 
decisions are made in the lab where everyone's around or mostly by one 
person...  Also I didn't notice an IRC channel, cvs list, public bugtracking 
system, etc...

I'd like to hear more about it -- notably Marco's thoughts on these issues.

Cheers,

- -Scott

- -- 
Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so. 
- --Bertrand Russell
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