A Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle [LWN.net]

A Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle

Posted Sep 26, 2008 21:33 UTC (Fri) by pynm0001 (guest, #18379)
In reply to: A Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle by obi
Parent article: A Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle

"For the same reason, I don't think a new framework will pop up from
nowhere that supplants Gstreamer - these things take time to mature, and
even if one does appear, I doubt it would be ready before KDE 5.xx."

A new framework isn't the issue. All that is required is to break API
compatibility in gstreamer itself.

This happened no less than two times in my time with JuK in KDE 3. We had
C++ bindings to gst-0.6 which we used in JuK. These bindings were broken
by gst-0.8 and we eventually simply coded gst-0.8 support directly into
JuK. Then gst-0.10 came out and we had to re-do the support again.
gst-0.10 has been out for awhile but do you want to be the one to guarantee
that gst-0.12 won't be out while KDE 4 is still supported?

I've gone over all of these arguments more than 2 years ago:
http://lwn.net/Articles/183462/

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A Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle

Posted Sep 27, 2008 23:14 UTC (Sat) by obi (guest, #5784) [Link] (1 responses)

I see, what you say makes sense - it's not unlikely there will be a gst 0.12 within the lifetime of KDE 4.x.

However - weighing the work required to create Phonon and its backends vs the potential work needed to maintain gst 0.10 for a while on your own (there will likely be other organisations interested in a stable 0.10 branch too however) if a gst were to happen during 4.xx, I'd probably avoid building something completely new.

However, this is a judgment call, and I trust you have a lot more experience with it than me. You address the problems with supporting 0.10 yourselves in your mail from 2 years ago:

"So if we just rely on gstreamer 0.10, now we're stuck with an abandoned code base, which KDE developers are unfamiliar with. Does this sound familiar to anyone? ;)"

I think this is the crux of the issue.

You've avoided this by creating Phonon. However, I believe 0.10 has quite a bit of mindshare, and I believe that the KDE people would not have found themselves all alone maintaining the abandoned 0.10 (while OTOH they are pretty much on their own maintaining Phonon). Well, I do see how this might seem very similar to the aRts situation, but aRts wasn't used a lot outside of the KDE world. Maintaining Phonon + backends (which have to interface with the codebases you're not familiar with) must take quite a lot of effort too.

A Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle

Posted Oct 3, 2008 19:43 UTC (Fri) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

There won't be much work maintaining Phonon, as it's incredibly small
compared to gstreamer (or any other multimedia framework). After all, it's
only a wrapper. Besides, Qt Software (Nokia) is maintaining it now ;-)

Don't skip over the advantage of transparent support for Mac & Windows
either - and Phonon also allows users to use another multimedia layer like
Xine or VLC. So more choice for users, easier api for developers and
insurance against api changes. I'd say a bargain ;-)