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Mark Shuttleworth interview (Linux Format)

Mark Shuttleworth interview (Linux Format)

Posted Oct 4, 2006 0:51 UTC (Wed) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263)
In reply to: Mark Shuttleworth interview (Linux Format) by Janne
Parent article: Mark Shuttleworth interview (Linux Format)

GStreamer has nothing to do with a sound server.

ESD is GNOME's sound server (and it is, AFAIK, quite a bit older than Arts).

GStreamer is a framework for decoding mediafiles, and pushing the encoded soundstreams to a soundserver or directly to the HW, and the videostreams to video output. It can also send streams somewhere else, i.e. soundstreams to a visualization program. KDE has nothing like it.

The Amarok devs are (or maybe was, I didn't follow the discussion lately) pushing for GStreamer inclusion in KDE, but ofcourse KDE did the NIH, and want to make their own thing, can't remember it's name...


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Mark Shuttleworth interview (Linux Format)

Posted Oct 4, 2006 5:26 UTC (Wed) by Janne (guest, #40891) [Link]

"The Amarok devs are (or maybe was, I didn't follow the discussion lately) pushing for GStreamer
inclusion in KDE, but ofcourse KDE did the NIH, and want to make their own thing, can't remember
it's name..."

Phonon? Phonon is an abstraction-layer that lets KDE use any media-framework that comes along,
including Gstreamer. I do believe that Gstreamer was the first mediasystem that Phonon supported.
And what makes you think that KDE suffers from NIH? Do you have any examples?

Mark Shuttleworth interview (Linux Format)

Posted Oct 4, 2006 10:52 UTC (Wed) by pointwood (subscriber, #2814) [Link]

You claim that KDE did the NIH thing, but at the same time you say that you didn't follow the discussion. In other words, what you're saying is pure FUD, sorry.

If you had actually checked out why the KDE developers are creating Phonon, you would also know that there are quite good reasons for creating it.

Here is a comment from a KDE developer:
http://lwn.net/Articles/183462/

As he writes, he posted more about it in a post on his blog which he links to. I suggest reading that as well.

Mark Shuttleworth interview (Linux Format)

Posted Oct 5, 2006 7:39 UTC (Thu) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263) [Link]

I certainly read that before, and it boils down to, "because we screwed up our own junk, we wont use other people's stuff"

This still is NIH, just a scared version of it.

There's no reason to collaborate with KDE devs, they screw it up every single time. In 20 years it STILL will be impossible to make a simple skin change to support different desktops because of these morons.

"OH NO, there's a G in it, let's wrap it in tons of junk to make it seem like we don't use it"

Mark Shuttleworth interview (Linux Format)

Posted Oct 5, 2006 8:18 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Ah, this must be the famous civility that KDE users so infamously lack.

Mark Shuttleworth interview (Linux Format)

Posted Oct 5, 2006 8:30 UTC (Thu) by pointwood (subscriber, #2814) [Link]

The same NIH that is responsible for implementing freedesktop.org
standards like D-Bus in KDE4?

Phonon doesn't mean that KDE4 isn't going to use Gstreamer. In fact,
Gstreamer was the first to be supported IIRC. I'm not sure what exactly
the problem is?

AFAIK, the KDE devs are very much supporting the freedesktop.org
initiative and are making sure KDE implements support for it. Do you have
any examples of the opposite?

Mark Shuttleworth interview (Linux Format)

Posted Oct 5, 2006 11:56 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Yes, and ESD and arts have one thing in common: they're awful. They're simultaneously implementing lots of things nobody uses (especially arts), and barely capable of playing a simple sound stream without stuttering the hell out of it and eating vast amounts of CPU (especially esd).

polypaudio recently restarted development and got a name change (to pulseaudio) and even more nifty (yet actually *useful*) features like a system-daemon mode and modules to do things like HAL lookup of sound sinks. Plus it's got esd library compatibility (though not arts yet). Also its CPU usage is much lower now (unless you do something like ask for high-quality interpolation).

Strongly recommended. How the hell Lennart finds the time to work on so many things at once is quite beyond me: he must have a time machine. (Plus they're all so well-written...)

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