KDE Sound and Multimedia Plan

[Ian Monroe]

On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 4:06 PM, Martin Sandsmark <sandsmark at samfundet.no> wrote:
> 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.

Colin's approach has the advantage of already being implemented and
supported in the distros.

Ian