Fwd: A few questions on Phonon

[Luciano Montanaro]

Hi all,
I'm posting this again here, after a suggestion by Aaron on my message on 
kde-devel. 

Lately, I've been working on adding sound effects to KGoldrunner using Phonon.

My initial experiments using phonon with the xine backend were a bit 
disappointing (well, more than a bit, actually), since trying to have more 
than one mediaObject active did not work (And my short sounds were all 
chopped off, but this should be fixed with recent libxines).

Fortunately, I have tried the kdereview gstreamer backend, which seem to 
handle contemporarily playing sounds pretty well.

Now my question is: how do I know the backend will work for me? Is there a way 
to query how many MediaObjects can be active at the same time? I browsed the 
Phonon docs, and I did not find a way...

Actually, more important is, will the gstreamer backend be packaged with kde 
4.1? Will it be the default? Because without it, sound should default to off 
for the game.

One feature I've found I miss for my use case is a way to preload (or at least 
predecode) the sound effects. I'd like to ship sounds in the ogg vorbis 
format to keep package size small, but unless I can preload them I have to 
use a PCM format, really.

Finally, I'd like to have some overview on the plan for Phonon in the near 
future -- or even in the not so near future.

Well, I may have more questions to follow, but these are more than enough to 
start...


Luciano