That's why we have Phonon in Qt/KDE [LWN.net]

That's why we have Phonon in Qt/KDE

Posted Sep 19, 2008 6:50 UTC (Fri) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742)
Parent article: LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

This article makes it very obvious why we decided to have our own
multimedia wrapper layer for Qt4/KDE4 apps, Phonon.
There is OSS, ALSA, GStreamer, libxine, MAS, NMM, JACK, now also
PulseAudio, and what is libsydney and portaudio ?
So instead to decide for any one of these now and then have to support it
for the years to come (no matter whether the actual developers are still
maintaining it or not), we created Phonon, which is *THE* portable
multimedia API (*NIX, OSX, Win) if you are writing a Qt4/KDE4
application.

Alex

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That's why we have Phonon in Qt/KDE

Posted Sep 19, 2008 7:04 UTC (Fri) by Tuxie (guest, #47191) [Link]

libsydney and portaudio are wrappers like Phonon. In the same category there are also libao, SDL-audio and others.

What I miss most with PulseAudio is AC3/DTS/AAC passthrough. I hope that will be implemented soon. It's not too uncommon to have the computer connected to a receiver via SPDIF nowadays, and having it go through the AC3 -> decode -> PA -> ALSA AC3-encoder -> receiver is a lot worse CPU wise than just AC3 -> receiver when the system is already struggling with being able to decode the 1080p video stream in realtime.

That's why we have Phonon in Qt/KDE

Posted Sep 19, 2008 9:50 UTC (Fri) by Frej (subscriber, #4165) [Link]

Same issue here :)

That's why we have Phonon in Qt/KDE

Posted Sep 21, 2008 23:23 UTC (Sun) by mezcalero (subscriber, #45103) [Link]

phonon is a very different wrapper than libsydney and portaudio. The latter two wrap PCM output, the former a media decoder with a couple of other things.

Lennart