Choosing a Phonon backend

[Leo Spalteholz]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 4:33 AM, Tanguy Krotoff <tkrotoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 8:43 PM, Matthias Kretz <kretz at kde.org> wrote:
>  >  Yes, I'm considering adding something like a set of flags and then the
>  >  application can say
>  >
>  >  Phonon::setRequiredFeatures(Phonon::SomeFeature | Phonon::SomeOtherFeature);
>  >
>  >  The remaining problem is that there must be at least one backend for every
>  >  platform that supports all features otherwise the above call could result in
>  >  a situation where no backend would fit - which doesn't make sense.
>  >
>  >  And yeah, I don't think the application can be smarter than the framework in
>  >  deciding what backend to use. That's why there's no API to select the backend
>  >  from the API.
>
>  What about the user? can he be smarter than the framework to decide?
>  I'm developing a VLC + MPlayer backend.
>  So I imagine a video app that let's the user choose which backend he wants.
>
>  MPlayer does not handle DVD menus, VLC does. From the video app it
>  would be nice to say "for DVD playback I prefer the VLC backend and
>  for others videos I prefer MPlayer" or "for .mov files I prefer
>  MPlayer, for the rest VLC".

Yikes.  Please think of the user here too.  Choosing one backend is
obtuse enough
for most users.  Choosing multiple backends depending on the source requires
all sorts of extra knowledge on top of that (which backend supports
which feature?).
On top of that, the UI to configure this will certainly not be nice.

Definitely would be nice to have the ability to choose backends from
the code, but
this is really not the sort of thing that should be exposed to the
user (aside from the
global choice in KDE).

Leo