KDE Sound and Multimedia Plan

[Mark Kretschmann]

On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 1:11 AM, Alex Fiestas <alex at eyeos.org> wrote:
> 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).

I find it a bad idea to try putting even more complexity into Phonon.
We are already having a hard time maintaining it, and doing what you
proposed sure wouldn't help.

My proposal:
Use the new QtGStreamer (made by Collabora) if you need real power. It
has a nice API, and offers anything you could wish for, feature wise.

-- 
Mark Kretschmann
Amarok Developer, Software Engineer at KO GmbH
Fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe
http://amarok.kde.org - http://fsfe.org - http://kogmbh.com