Gstreamer developer Christian Schaller explains why he thinks Phonon (announced a few days ago by the KDE project) is a broken wheel. "I have held back blogging about Phonon for some time to avoid flamewars, but I don't want to have efforts like OSDL delayed due to setups like Phonon being promoted or thought of as a workable solution for the issues faced. Let me start of with a brief introduction to the area of multimedia frameworks."
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-10-19
> For those who say GStremer is unstable, check your config or distro
Stability here does not so much refer to application crashes as whether an application that works with the current GStreamer version can be reasonably expected to work with future versions without breakage. Recently, the GStreamer 0.8->0.10 transition was more painful than it perhaps should have been.
> if all desktop enviroment work on a common sound server then there are more chances to make it stable.
Perhaps, but KDE 4 can't afford to rely on an unstable one and hope things are just going to work out. Phonon is a contingency as well as a comfort layer. The idea is to protect users from backend problems by not taking the risk of limiting KDE 4 to one.
> the same was said about Cairo when it was implemented and now Rocks!!
While my knowledge on cairo is lacking, I believe the Mozilla guys still aren't entirely happy with its performance (hazily remembering Planet Mozilla blog posts here). It may eventually get there, and when it does the synergy effect will definitely have helped, but I'd be cautious about suggesting it as a magic bullet.
Member since:2005-07-06
For those who say GStremer is unstable, check your config or distro because thay are wrong
Are they? Not from my perspective they're not, because something like Xine still works far better in most cases. Also, future versions of GStreamer need to work in exactly the same way. That hasn't happened.
the same was said about Cairo when it was implemented and now Rocks!!
I get the impression you're way too enthusiastic. It's performance still needs work, it needs to get way more programmre friendly and some of the Mozilla people haven't been too impressed with the performance.
Member since:2005-07-06
I think that GStreamer just had a big update with API changes, so it isn't stable.
With phonon you can do far less than with <insert favorite audio lib> but if the API of the audio lib change, only the corresponding plugin needs to be modified not all KDE's application.
And phonon's own API will hopefuly be more stable as it does less.
Member since:
2005-07-28
For those who say GStremer is unstable, check your config or distro because thay are wrong, the same was said about Cairo when it was implemented and now Rocks!!, if all desktop enviroment work on a common sound server then there are more chances to make it stable.