[Phonon] Things I expect from a modern video/audio multimedia api

[Sylvain "Skarsnik" Colinet]

Hi
I am a French student and my main interrest in multimedia library
is to rewrite a Karaoke player for a french association, actually it's
a mplayer 0.9x customized to fit our needs but it's a pain to compile
it, maintan it and make it work on win32.
So I start take a look at multimedia library like xine and gstreamer and
can't find something that don't need a full rewrite of subtitle engine.
That was 3 years ago and nothing seems to change, free software still
need a rather simple multimedia library to write thing like :
avdanced subtitle editing application, movie making applications
Lazy developpers, like me, doesn't want to deal with x11/codecs/sync things,
designing UI it's already a good challenge :)

I like the KDE project and I like the idea behind phonon :
provide an api that leave all tricky things to backend, so you don't need
to care about thing like "hey my 512kb mp42 file can't be read!"
that spend majority of developing effort in project like xine/mplayer

So I will list thing that developper can expect from a multimedia api
from my point of view :

- get info on media file, eg : framerate, size, menu/subtitle (for dvd
or advanced container)
- Can edit video frame, draw in them, change them to add some effect
- Set the video/audio speed
- Create stream, save it to file.
- Mix audio stream, have some effect (for game or audio editing app)

I know phonon is actualy good to write media player, but maybe one day
it can be ready
to write advanced video editing application and I want to help in that way.
I will have some free time this summer and I think I have a different
sight on phonon
than many developper that actualy use Phonon (I don't want to write
YetAnotherMediaPlayer )

Best regards
--
Sylvain "Skarsnik" Colinet
Victory was near but the power of the ring couldn't be undone