KDE 4 Multimedia: The Answer

[Zack Rusin]

On Monday 23 February 2004 00:04, Neil Stevens wrote:
> It seems plain to me now that in KDE 4, GStreamer on MAS is what
> should be used.
>
> Why?  GStreamer and MAS are part of the freedesktop.org effort, which
> KDE is increasingly following:
> http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/Home

Before reaching such important decisions I'd love to see someone 
summarizing the relevant servers/frameworks. 

The first and foremost thing is that we have to realize is that there's 
no way we could depend on one server as we did with aRts. We have to 
(strong emphasis on have to) have a plugable backend so that if 
something goes wrong we can replace the servers. It's especially 
important for a lot of people who are actually doing something more 
than playing audio files on gnu/linux since for them JACK is the 
prefered choice and forcing those people to use MAS along JACK is not 
something I'd like to do. JACK on the other hand also can't be the only 
supported by us server simply because of the fact that it's alsa 
specific. 

I'd love to see some head-to-head comparison of NMM vs. GStreamer. The 
reason why I'm not jumping to GStreamer too quickly is simply because 
just like NMM is not really used. Like someone said on this list all 
the apps using it pretty much suck at it, which I'm not sure is a 
positive point for GStreamer or a negative one. The spider idea is 
pretty nice and I don't mind the api too much but it's pretty much a 
no-brainer that api wise I'd take NMM anytime over GStreamer even with 
Tim's bindings. 

The negative thing about GStreamer is that its developers would really 
have to be there for us. The simple reason for that is that if 
something even simple doesn't work in NMM for a KDE developer it will 
be a lot easier to fix, while GStreamer imposes the requirement of 
learning the basics of GObject and GLib in order to do so (besides the 
typical multimedia stuff). There's of course no way that every one of 
them would do so, hence we'd depend on the fact that GStreamer 
developers would stay fairly responsive to our bug reports and not 
respond with something along the lines "GNOME release is in X weeks, 
we're concentrating on GNOME bugs, fix it yourself".

Zack

-- 
Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my disk?