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Phonon: Multimedia in KDE 4 (KDE.News)
KDE.News covers the new
Phonon project.
"After many months of work on the new Multimedia API for KDE 4 it is time to finally announce Phonon. Phonon will provide a task oriented API for multimedia, making it easy for KDE applications to use media playback and capture functionality (and more) resulting in application developers being free to concentrate on the user interface aspects. The number of possibilities to integrate multimedia into the desktop experience make Phonon especially interesting."
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Abstraction layers... Posted Apr 27, 2006 17:43 UTC (Thu) by cantsin (guest, #4420) [Link] In other words, KDE 4 applications will talk to Phonon, which in turn will talk to Gstreamer/Xine/[insert media backend here] which in turn will talk either to ALSA/OSS or to a daemon like jack which then talks to ALSA/OSS. Is it justified to be afraid of bloat and a debugging nightmare pending? The article Video I/O on Linux: Lessons Learned from SGI at least does suggest this.
Abstraction layers... Posted Apr 27, 2006 18:41 UTC (Thu) by jimi (guest, #6655) [Link] I agree that there may be some cause for concern. As a pro audio user, I've been using jack and ardour for a long time. Why doesn't KDE simply code for jack? Adding two more layers doesn't appear to achieve anything. I could understand having Phonon talk directly to jack or ALSA, but GStreamer? If GStreamer provides something wonderful that jack doesn't, why not simply extend GStreamer?
Abstraction layers... Posted Apr 27, 2006 20:17 UTC (Thu) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link] When KDE 2 was in the development, the KDE project decided to use arts.To use it directly. KDE 3 still depends on arts. But arts has become unmaintained. Now with KDE4 there's the chance to break binary compatibility. Should KDE decide for gstreamer ? Or for NMM, which seems to be really good in several areas ? Or use Jack directly ? But what if the one which would have been chosen dies in some years ? Then KDE 4 will be left with another dead multimediasystem. The idea of Phonon is to provide a simplified multimedia API for KDE applications. It will hide the details which backend is used, so if now gstreamer seems to be the choice, but in 2 years NMM will have won the race, it won't be a major problem for KDE. KDE applications will be able to work with both backends and not interfere with the rest of the system (as it is the case with arts). Pro-audio applications will still want to use the underlying backend directly, e.g. Jack, because they will require more functionality than Phonon will provide. So, Phonon is an API to ease the development of multimedia-enabled applications. IMO a very sensible decision. Alex
Abstraction layers... Posted Apr 27, 2006 21:13 UTC (Thu) by cloose (subscriber, #5066) [Link] Also the multimedia engine plugins in amaroK clearly show that such an abstraction layer is doable without causing bloat.
Abstraction layers... Posted Apr 28, 2006 14:27 UTC (Fri) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link] juk, kaffeine and probably others also follow a similar pattern. it is arather well proven method at this point =)
Abstraction layers... Posted Apr 28, 2006 14:26 UTC (Fri) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link] not only is it longevity of the current media frameworks, it's alsoportability and easy of use. with kde2 and kde3, if a system did not have aRts desktop sound was impacted quite harshly. kde4 should work well on many more systems since the OS integrator/vendor can select the media stack they wish to supply and kde can be easily adapted to that by selecting (or writing if it doesn't already exist) the appropriate Phonon backend.
i also expect to see more applications provide multimedia features with
lack of unique, innovative qualities Re: Phonon: Multimedia in KDE 4 (KDE.News) Posted Apr 27, 2006 19:40 UTC (Thu) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link] The web pages seem lacking in showing what is new or unique of this new system in comparison to existing frameworks. Looks like just another API with perhaps good C++-ism for the KDE environment, and yet another thing to complicate the standardization of GNU/Linux on the desktop. The scope is smaller than gstreamer. And gstreamer takes a few years to mature.
lack of unique, innovative qualities Re: Phonon: Multimedia in KDE 4 (KDE.News) Posted Apr 27, 2006 22:09 UTC (Thu) by hconnellan (subscriber, #231) [Link] This will be the standard API that KDE apps will interface. Don't forget that KDE is used on a number of different environments (including natively on Windows for the next version, KDE4).
With the abstraction layer, KDE app developers will only have to code to one API and developers who port to different environments will only have to create a plugin for phonon for that environement for all the KDE apps to work. This is the only sensible way to go.
lack of unique, innovative qualities Re: Phonon: Multimedia in KDE 4 (KDE.News) Posted Apr 28, 2006 14:21 UTC (Fri) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link] > hat is new or unique of this new system in comparison to existing> frameworks
very little. =) it has two important attributes: it allows any multimedia
> yet another thing to complicate the standardization of GNU/Linux on the
quite the opposite, actually. if the linux desktop were to standardize of
compare and contrast with what other projects are doing and how their
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