Choosing a Phonon backend

[Leo Spalteholz]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 12:17 PM, Ian Monroe <ian at monroe.nu> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 1:56 PM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
>  > On Friday 28 March 2008, Fabio Locati wrote:
>  >  > As I said some time ago, imho phonon have to be able to use in the same
>  >  > time more than one backend.
>  >
>  >  just realize that not all backends will be simultaneously usable. that's where
>  >  this whole thing really starts to fall apart.
>  >
>  >
>  >  > When a program ask to phonon a function that is not developped in
>  >  > the 'default backend'
>  >
>  >  i think this is where things go awry. the program should not care about this.
>  >  phonon should abstract away these issues and decisions, and really the
>  >  application has no way to know which backends will be available or which
>  >  features they provide or don't.
>  >
>  >  were i the phonon designers (i'm not =), i'd say firmly but simply: "if you
>  >  are considering what happens behind the scenes of Phonon in your application,
>  >  then either Phonon needs to be improved or your application is Doing It
>  >  Wrong."
>
>  I don't really think this this is true. Phonon can be working fine,
>  the application is doing things fine, but if you use the DS9 backend
>  and don't have the correct balance of codecs installed the user is
>  going to have a poor experience compared to if they used the (future)
>  VideoLAN backend. So in a year or so when phonon-vlc is finished and
>  Solid on Windows is working well, I'm going to probably release a
>  Dragon Player for Windows and I'll want to control which backend is
>  used.

I don't really see the problem.  Ship phonon-vlc and tell Qt to look
for plugins in your app folder first.  If that is not possible then
its really a bug in Qt.  Not that it really matters.  On Windows the
vast majority of people won't have Qt installed, and there won't be
any problem with phonon picking up another backend.

Leo