Future of Phonon?

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Hello,

So, we discussed a bit, during aKademy, about KDE multimedia and Phonon.

The truth is that it's a mess...

It's a mess for multiple reasons, but the biggest are phonon's original
ideas solving a problem noone had; the huge fuckup from Qt with
QtMultimedia, QtMultimediaKit, QtMultimedia 2.0 (Qt5) (even after we
told them) and finally because KDE multimedia applications are really
not good...

While we can't do much about the past, we can discuss about the
future...

So far, the KDE Multimedia applications are:

Audio:
 - AmaroK
 - JuK
 - kscd

Video
 - Dragon
 - Bangarang

And the other users are dolphin, gwenview, digiKam and Knotification.


Plasma media center is using QtMultimedia, because of QML.

Kdenlive is out of scope...

Of those applications, none are amazing nor in good shape, which does
not help too much to find good use cases, tbh...


So we have a few solutions:
 - drop phonon totally, and let developers have fun with the 45+ classes
   of QtMultimedia and various backends,
 - prepare a phonon5 version with a huge new API,
 - deprecate a bit the weird phonon4 classes, add a Qml layer for the common
   classes (VideoView, MediaPlayer, Media), and let see if that's enough
   for Plasma media center and updates of Dragon and the other.
 - use qt-vlc everywhere :)


I'd argue the Qml on phonon4 is the simplest to do. We could take API
ideas from qt-vlc, for example...

Ideas? Thoughts?


With my kindest regards,

-- 
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
http://www.jbkempf.com/ - +33 672 704 734
Sent from my Electronic Device
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