The cake, it was a lie [LWN.net]

The cake, it was a lie

Posted Sep 25, 2012 12:04 UTC (Tue) by sebas (guest, #51660)
In reply to: The cake, it was a lie by obi
Parent article: GStreamer 1.0 released

As far as I can count, since the inception of Phonon, we had 2 ABI/API incompatible versions. of GStreamer. That's painfully often, but luckily we found a way to shield developers using KDE APIs from that.

Also note, that GStreamer is not the only backend we have for Phonon. VLC is enjoying a lot of work, and tends to give less headaches than GStreamer's backend. (It's not an option for everybody, since shipping VLC with its support for everything scares some distributors away for legal reasons, but it surely works very well.

Basically, the multimedia world is moving too fast (which in principle is good, since we need progress there) for providing stable APIs. That has to be done on top of that.

For KDE, Phonon prove to be very benefitial, since we didn't have to put all our eggs into one basket.

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The cake, it was a lie

Posted Sep 25, 2012 12:45 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

> VLC is enjoying a lot of work, and tends to give less headaches than GStreamer's backend.

So you have an abstraction layer that behaves differently depending on what it's abstracting?

The cake, it was a lie

Posted Sep 25, 2012 14:57 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Yup. When gstreamer can't play a particular .mkv, there's very little phonon can do to prevent the abstraction from leaking.