KDE Sound and Multimedia Plan

[Martin Sandsmark]

On Wednesday 1. December 2010 16.34.56 Mauricio Piacentini wrote:
> One example is the audio needs for games I outlined in my previous
> email: people have tried to address it for a couple of years. I think it
> is not easily solvable inside Phonon or QtGStreamer, and solving it with
> OpenAL as it is being attempted is probably not the best way as well.
> Someone mentioned to me once that it was better to write a simple class
> that talked to PulseAudio directly to play samples in this way, but
> maybe it can be a Phonon "tracker" class that uses a direct connection
> to the backends, who knows (I am speculating here). So having a list of
> needs is valuable, otherwise every module (games, edu...) will try to
> solve it differently. The multimedia team could handle this better imo
> from a central place but I think it is not aware of the needs from
> application authors.

I think I explained this on IRC many moons ago too; but it should be fairly 
easy to write your own class inheriting MediaSource that caches the audio data 
in memory for instant delivery. It could of course also be implemented 
directly in Phonon, but I don't know how much we want to clutter Phonon with 
special casing like this. Maybe it could live in the common kdegames 
libraries.

If you want more advanced stuff (positional transformations or what-have-you), 
for example using OpenAL, you could still probably interface with Phonon to 
get the preferred audio output device or whatnot, though.

-- 
Martin T. Sandsmark