[KDE] Which Phonon? Phonon backend - GStreamer or Xine?

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 30.09.09 13:53, Rahul Sundaram (sundaram at fedoraproject.org) wrote:

> 
> On 09/30/2009 01:45 PM, Jaroslav Reznik wrote:
> 
> > So where's the problem? There are two Phonons - one in Qt, one in KDE. I don't 
> > like this schizophrenia. This should be solved but now we have to live with 
> > one or another - that's why we brought this issue to the world.
> 
> The problem is that Nokia now seems to be developing yet another
> abstraction layer. So we will have to be dealing the Phonon in KDE,
> Phonon in Qt and whatever Nokia brings up next and all the possible
> backends. The number of different paths that requires comprehensive
> testing has exploded. We are also debating which backend to use as the
> default for a long time and as usual, switching backends is exchanging
> one set of bugs with another so neither is going to be ideal.
> 
> I would prefer Gstreamer as the backend simply because users can install
> a set of plugins (third party repo or Fluendo) and have their content
> play in all the different desktop environments. We can fix bugs once in
> Gstreamer and be done with it. However that depends on how much testing
> this backend has received and what bugs have been found and how severe
> they are.

This is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: if you don't activate gst
noone will test it. But you don't want to activate it by default
without testing.

We're Fedora, the distro which is always a bit ahead of the other
distributions, aren't we? So I think it would make a lot of sense to
switch to make our distro Gst-only asap. Eventually this move will
have to happen anyway. And if it's not us who does the switch first,
who will?

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4