Small problem for Linux ? Sure. Big problem for Linux user? Of course. [LWN.net]

Small problem for Linux ? Sure. Big problem for Linux user? Of course.

Posted Jul 9, 2009 7:47 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185)
In reply to: Small problem for Linux ? Sure. Big problem for Linux user? Of course. by Frej
Parent article: Google Chrome OS and the community

We manage alright. We have a fairly complicated application that uses Qt and about a dozen other
third party libraries. Our binaries (http://www.hyves.nl/hyvesdesktop/download/) have been
reported to work successfully on many linux distributions.

Of course, we ran into trouble when we wanted to support sound. Qt's phonon uses GStreamer as a
backend and that's a mess. We came to the conclusion that we'd better use QSound, since the
alternative would have been to redistribute the right gstreamer with all plugins ourselves.
Something compiled against a platfrom gstreamer on one distribution will crash on all other
distributions (that we tried).

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Sound

Posted Jul 9, 2009 12:52 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

I thought Phonon was a KDE thing, not a Qt thing.

I also thought that the whole point of Phonon was that you don't have to
deal with the underlying Gstreamer (or Xine or whatever) engine at all, so
that engine could be swapped out or upgraded at will, as long as your
Phonon can handle the varying engines. Thus the confusion from Gstreamer
people who thought (wrongly) that Phonon was intended to replace
Gstreamer.

Of course, if you have a Qt app rather than a KDE app, it would seem to
make sense to use Qsound rather than Phonon anyway.

Sound

Posted Jul 9, 2009 13:09 UTC (Thu) by johnflux (subscriber, #58833) [Link]

Phonon was originally KDE, but was moved from KDE into Qt.

Sound

Posted Jul 9, 2009 13:33 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

It's a Qt thing. But at least in Qt 4.4.x it was quite problematic. On WIndows XP, it would play wav
files, which it wouldn't play on WIndow Vista, where phonon would be able to play mp3, which it
wasn't able to play on XP... On OSX everything was fine. And on Linux, an app compiled on Ubuntu,
crashed in gestreamer on OpenSUSE and Fedora -- and all other permutation gave the same result.

We'll have to try again with 4.5 -- 4.5 is in many ways a great series of releases with lots of fixes
and cool things.