Slax author's Blog (RSS)

Multimedia backend for Phonon

In KDE, all multimedia is to be handled by Phonon. Phonon is the multimedia API provided by Qt and is the standard abstraction for handling multimedia streams within KDE4. It's main purpose is to provide a stable API for KDE 4's lifetime.

Phonon itself doesn't play multimedia itself. For that task, phonon has so called backends. There is a xine backend (deprecated), mplayer backend (deprecated), vlc backend and gstreamer backend. If a KDE application requests phonon to play sound or video, phonon translates the request to its backend to do that.

Which of the phonon's backends should I use for Slax? Actually that is a bit problem at the moment since none of the backends is perfect. Xine backend has bugs in playing audio files (tried mp3 and ogg). Mplayer backend doesn't work at all. VLC backend requires VLC (which is too big so I didn't even try that). And the preferred gstreamer backend is outdated. The current version of phonon-gstreamer works perfectly with sound, but it's not possible to compile the new version with libav (ffmpeg), thus video is missing at all.

For now, I'll use gstreamer backend in Slax, to handle 100% of the audio tasks. Furthermore I'll use MPlayer (not the -phonon backend, but just the player) with smplayer GUI as a vodeo player, so user can play videos in Slax too. As soon as phonon's gstreamer backend is ready for the version of gstreamer 1.0.* then I'll update it, to make sure both video and audio goes through phonon in the future.

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