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

A Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle

Posted Sep 28, 2008 14:25 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: A Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle by quintesse
Parent article: A Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle

obi's argument appears to be that maintaining phonon is wasted effort
because you have to adapt to changes in gstreamer's API anyway.

But this is erroneous, because if you have to maintain gstreamer yourself,
even if you don't add any features it's like maintaining a hundred
phonons: all those plugins then need to be maintained, and each of *those*
requires tracking changes in the downstream APIs... much more work.

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A Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle

Posted Sep 28, 2008 23:50 UTC (Sun) by obi (guest, #5784) [Link] (1 responses)

Actually my argument was more along the line of: "I'd rather have a lot of people help maintain one framework (albeit an old branch), than have several libraries maintained by just a a few people each"; However if Phonon really is as thin as you guys say, and maintaining a stable gst 0.10 really would be like a hundred phonons - then I guess I'm just wrong. The point is moot especially considering Phonon is out there; sorry for wasting your time.

A Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle

Posted Sep 29, 2008 0:02 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

gstreamer basically consists of two pieces: the core, which provides
plumbing to connect together plugins, and the plugins. The majority of
those plugins are interfaces to other audio/video libraries (everything
from monsters like ffmpeg to little things like libogg or libmad). As
such, gstreamer has to track changes to the APIs of the libraries used by
all those plugins. (Thankfully, most are quite stable, but not all:
pulseaudio has bumped API in the last couple of years, and ffmpeg hardly
ever stops changing...)