Abstraction layers... [LWN.net]

Abstraction layers...

Posted Apr 27, 2006 20:17 UTC (Thu) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742)
In reply to: Abstraction layers... by jimi
Parent article: Phonon: Multimedia in KDE 4 (KDE.News)

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

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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 a
rather 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 also
portability 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
Phonon since it should provide a simpler API that is more familiar for
those already used to the kde/Qt conventions while ensuring it works
everywhere. right now coding with aRts is a bit trickier than is useful
for casual media additions (think of video clips in presentations as an
example) and isn't guaranteed to work everywhere anyways.