“The team behind the popular open-source video player VLC is busy working on an Android app, which could be released in early 2011. Lead VLC developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf told me on Thursday that it will be ‘a matter of weeks‘ until the release of the first VLC app for Android-based mobile devices.”
And this makes me wonder what are they using as the backend, since they built a phonon backend for VLC but Qt doesn’t run on Android, so I doubd they are using the backend they use for the desktop VLC.
Phonon is not exclusive to Qt.
I imagine they’ve built a custom back-end for using Android’s HW accelerator (or I hope they did). If the given codec isn’t supported they must likely drop down into software decoding.
Ffmpeg and other codec libraries in use by VLC are fairly optimized for ARM, so this could actually make a fairly decent playback program. Battery life will be terrible if they don’t use HW decoding though.
Phonon is not exclusive to Qt.
Excuse me?
There are two versions of Phonon: the one included in QT, and the one included in KDE. They are different, although the devs do try to keep them as closely synced as possible. The KDE Phonon has more features and backends, though.
There is a QT port on Android. It’s called android-lighthouse.
VLC actually uses its own playback engine directly called libvlc. The Phonon-VLC backend allows Qt applications to playback audio using libvlc, rather than the other way round. So I guess they will continue to use libvlc on Android.