KDE 4 Multimedia: The Answer

[Sylvain Joyeux]

I'm new to the list, so I'm sorry if I don't have the knowledge of aRts and 
the current KDE/Multimedia goals. I have begun to write a player and a 
inspector for GStreamer using the QGst bindings from Tim Jansen. 

The design goals of GStreamer are quite impressive. It is designed to be 
used for any task in need of a data pipeline. The current <<stable>> 
release does work in the audio and video areas, but the A/V sync is very 
VERY bad. It looks like the upcoming 0.8 release will be a lot better.

The only drawback of GStreamer is that it is based on glib. Of course, it 
is not a limitation for using the framework, but if one KDE developer 
wants to write a plugin, he will have to learn glib. And I don't see how a 
C++ developer can like GLib (but that's because I love C++).

On the good side, the GStreamer developer don't want to be GNOME-centric. 
They do care of being used by anyone (and by KDE), and as such I think 
they will try to avoid any compatibility problem between GLib and the KDE 
libraries

It's quite good on the speed side. I tried to compare mplayer, xine and 
gstreamer a few months ago, and it did compete well. (much better than 
aRts...)

Best regards
-- 
Sylvain Joyeux