Phonon

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Jaroslav Reznik at 23/07/10 09:31 did gyre and gimble:
>>> But that still doesn't solve problem that on some systems GStreamer
>>> (people like it or not (hate is the right word)...) is better maintained
>>> or even the only one solution available. So I'm in favor to support at
>>> least VLC and GStreamer on the same level.

I think that because the QtMultimedia folk are still favouring GST
(primarily because of favourable license terms AFAICT), I suspect that
some for of "Qt + GST" marriage will continue in
not-quite-blissful-matrimony for some time to come, so I think the short
term future is VLC + GST (probably with GST limping behind like an
unloved stray dog with a dodgy leg.... and flees).

>> Well, the problem is that the gstreamer backend is not currently
>> maintained and has far too many bugs to be recommendable. If the
>> distributions really care, some help would be appreciated. So far, not
>> even gstreamer is flawless with new bugs appearing every now and then
>> (one only recently), its structure is not exactly easy to grasp with
>> far too many codecs/demuxers/encoders/plugins etc. which makes it a
>> quite complicated framework. Some Mandriva developers did contribute
>> code but since they no longer work for Mandriva nothing has moved in
>> the gstreamer backend since.
> 
> Fair enough, I shouldn't talk but help in this case (and yes, I'm scared from 
> GStreamer and PulseAudio complexity ;-). Could you point me for beginning to 
> the top GStreamer backend bugs/problems I can take a look?

FWIW, the PulseAudio support in Phonon is pretty much shared by all
backends. I tried to write it in such a way that it has minimal impact
on backend developers so they can pretty much ignore it but for a couple
of specific checks to enable or disable it (e.g. like checking the
backend itself has support for PulseAudio output plugin of some sort).
Once PA support is enabled, all device handling (switching devices,
enumerating them for display to the user etc.), all volume handling and
(in the future) some degree of support for auto-corking/pausing of the
media player when certain events happen (e.g. pause music/video on VOIP
call) is all handled by the shared PulseAudio support code in libphonon
itself.


With regards to VLC specifically, there are still some problems with
it's PA output layer that I've simply not had a huge amount of time to
look at. I will eventually get around to it, but I'm also happy to
discuss any issues with folk who are interested in working on it too.

Take care.

Col


-- 

+------------------------+
|     Colin Guthrie      |
+------------------------+
| http://colin.guthr.ie/ |
+------------------------+