goal of kde-multimedia ?

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Monday 23 February 2004 18:34, Scott Wheeler wrote:
...
> JuK and RhythmBox have begun to make large dents in the xmms hegemony.

Yes, I even mentioned juk explicitely :-)

> Both GNOME and KDE are moving away from monolithic applications such as
> mplayer and xmms -- really you've possibly picked the two classical cases
> of terrible design in the Linux multimedia world.

Probably I *am* too short-sighted, but both work perfectly e.g. for me and my 
girl friend, and I even hacked a bit on both. Where are the big design 
problems ?

...
> The goal of KDE multimedia -- at least in my opinion is to have (a) a
> framework in which to develop multimedia enabled applications and (b) to
> develop a set of those applications that are thought of as the standard
> multimedia applications for a modern desktop.

I would really like it if we can achieve this, but are you sure we have the 
man power to do it ?  E.g. mplayer has many contributors which concentrate 
only on mplayer. This is different from KDE, where most people don't work on 
only one topic. Are we able to get better results than the mplayer/xine 
crowds with only a handful of developers working on it casually ?

> > PS.: Discussions about the bad code of mplayer are pointless, it works
> > great, is fast, many developers, widespread usage and the code *is*
> > understandable (I wrote some patches, it is possible). It's not that
> > nice, but you can find your way through it.
>
> Crappy code can be fixed; crappy design usually can't without major
> surgery.
>
> Again, sorry Alex, but I personally feel like most of your arguments and
> goals are overly simplified and short-sighted.  I'm also not sure if you're

Yes, this is possible.
But what do we need more than an easy-to-use sound player class and an 
easy-to-use video widget/kpart ? Maybe this is short-sighted, but I don't see 
what I am missing.

I guess probably we'll go for gstreamer ? Sounds quite good, and with e.g. MAS 
we also have network transparency. This would probably also fix the "too few 
developers" bug ;-)

Bye
Alex
-- 
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