KDE Sound and Multimedia Plan

[Alex Fiestas]

Hi there fellow multimedians (yes, we need a better name).

After a few talks in #Phonon / #QtGstreaer / #Kubuntu-devel and after 
hearing that we have new blood working on Phonon (Hi there apachelogger) 
we ended up with the conclusion that it would be nice to start a thread 
in the kde-multimedia mailinglist to design a plan which will fix our 
stack once and for all.

Before starting to discuss about technologies, let's take time to think 
about our needs since is only after knowing them that we can start to 
figure out what solution we want or we have to take.

So, let's use this email to create a preliminary list of needs, and 
please only about needs! I know that within our little community there 
are a lot of different ideas about how to fix the different problems we 
may have, but let's hold that thoughts for the next thread, ok?

Also please, what we are discussing here are the needs for developers, 
not feature wishes for user-side applications, these do not belong here.

This is my list of needs:

1-Abstract high level API
     If we want to promote the usage of multimedia in KDE we've to 
provide a high level API to do it easily, the majority of KDE developers 
work on they spare time, if we want them to add multimedia features we 
have to make they life easy.

2-Low latency easy concurrency
     The time between the "play" function in our application and when 
the sound actually play is important for a lot of applications (KNotify 
for instance), we need to ensure the lower latency possible. Also we 
need to provide an easy way to play more than one sound in parallel 
(KNotify as app example again).

3-Multimedia framework
     We need a full multimedia framework since specific applications may 
want to take full advantage of it (Screencast applications, Kamoso, or 
even VOIP apps).

4-API/ABI compatibility
     All mentioned before must be API/ABI compatibility just like 
kdelibs is.

Extra Bonus: Support for Alsa and Pulse Audio at least.
     I know that some people don't like PulseAudio, but imho we should 
support it as first class citizen since it is already stablished in our 
ecosystem.

This is my list of needs, what is yours?

Please, remember to keep the thread clean of Ex: "Everything can be done 
by using wine"

Cya and happy hacking :)