Phonon, Qt and backends. Who creates the backends?

[Jens Bache-Wiig]

Hi Tim

Since I am the person at Trolltech currently allocated to the
gstreamer backend, I should probably answer this.

> Hello Thierry,
>
>
> I've seen the slideshow you made for the Trolltech Developer Days (
> http://labs.trolltech.com/page/Projects/DevDays/DevDays2007 ) and I
> have a few questions about the backends for the Multimedia Framework /
> Phonon.
>
> I already knew that the multimedia framework in Qt is going to be
> based on Phonon. But what about the backends?
>
> Will the backends for Phonon be useable for the multimedia framework in Qt?
> Who will create those backends?
>

Yes, the plan is to use Phonon exactly as it is in KDE, hence we will
share the same backends. Any backends made would benefit KDE as well
as our customers.

I ask because I'm creating a GStreamer backend (and wrapper for the
> GStreamer library) for Phonon and I don't want to waste time in
> continuing developing this backend when Trolltech already decided to
> do that themselves.
>
Trolltech needs to make sure there are backends available on all the
platforms we support. Windows and mac backends will definately be
delivered by Trolltech as few others will have an interest in
delivering these within the time frame required by Trolltech. On the
X11 side the situation was a little bit more cloudy as there were
already a few projects announced. However looking into things a while
back the projects seemed either stalled or in an early state of
development so I started some preliminary work on an internal
gstreamer backend.
Since we following the devdays announcement have committed to
delivering a gstreamer backend it basically means we will have to
ensure that a backend is available in time for the 4.4 release.

> Note that I don't mind if Trolltech wants to do this themselves but
> I'd like to know I don't want to develop a backend for severtal months
> and notice that someone else developed one too in private and suddenly
> releases it.
>
A possibility would be to attempt to co-operate on the
project somehow given that this can be solved practically. But if you
have the knowledge that we have committed ourselves to doing this,
perhaps you would want to rather focus your efforts on the development
of the gstreamer bindings?

Jens Bache-Wiig