kdemm backends & Helix

[Matthias Kretz]

On Tuesday 14 September 2004 20:25, Ryan Gammon wrote:
> A couple of quick questions:
> 1. Is anyone interested in a helix-based implementation of these
> interfaces? (helixcommunity.org, helix client is the open-source media
> engine that powers the RealPlayer).

I am. And I'm all for including it in kdemultimedia. I won't be the person 
implementing it, though.

> 2. I'm a little confused by channels -- if there's something someone can
> point me at that talks a bit about what this is, it'd be much appreciated.

The Channel interface is not finished. It's pretty much a placeholder 
currently for an idea of Dik Takken (look at his mails to kde-multimedia - 
and the one to kde-core-devel if you want to know all the details). But 
basically it's a means of making apps use more advanced features of the media 
backend without the app actually knowing. So you could define a Channel that 
would send the audio through some effects before playing to the soundcard. Or 
another one that would send the data to a file or another computer.

> 3. If one wanted to provide access to extended media engine
> functionality with these interfaces, how would they go about doing it?

The idea currently is: "not at all". All the interface provides is the name 
and some general info on the backend kdemm would use. If an app wants more 
than the simple API in kdemm it's supposed to use the backend framework 
directly and don't mess with kdemm at all (of course it's not disallowed to 
do, but it's probably not a good idea).

> For example, we developed a simplifed gtk widget around the Helix Player
> for our Helix Player 1.0 / RealPlayer 10 for linux project. There's a
> lot of media engine functionality that we didn't want to add to the gtk
> api -- we wanted to keep it simple -- so we added a mechanism to get at
> the underlying engine.

And how do you do that? Thinking of kdemm that would mean installing a lib for 
all backends that can then be used at compile time by apps? Isn't just using 
the backend's API directly enough?

> Let's say I wanted to make playback statistics (packet loss, etc)
> available to an app, but that statistics was not something that was
> standardized enough across backends that it made sense for kdemm.
>
> Would I implement those methods on a hypothetical HelixVideoPlayer
> class, and cast from a VideoPlayer up to a HelixVideoPlayer in my app?

One could do that, but I don't think it's a good idea. What would be better 
IMHO is to have Qt/KDE bindings (meaning C++ with Qt/KDE APIs) for the 
framework.

-- 
C'ya
        Matthias
________________________________________________________
Matthias Kretz (Germany)                          <><
http://Vir.homeip.net/
MatthiasKretz at gmx.net, kretz at kde.org,
Matthias.Kretz at urz.uni-heidelberg.de
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