In the land of silly arguments

Seems Lennart started a bit of a debate with his Linux Sound layers blog post. Not all the reponses has been as enlightened though. For instance Aaron Segio managed to make me laugh with his argument for why Phonon was a good alternative for non-Qt applications:

“Phonon is also more than just an option for Qt apps: you’d be making a huge mistake not to use it. You see, Phonon gets you equal and native support on Windows and Mac as well without the user having to install, say, GStreamer..”

Really? Wow, I would never have thought that if you use something instead of the other you wouldn’t need the other…an absolutely brilliant deduction. While we are at it lets point out that if you install Firefox you do not need to install Opera, cause you already got a web browser!!

GStreamer is already used by cross platform applications such as Songbird and SyncTV. And Songbird is using the native codecs provided by DirectShow and Quicktime where available.

So in a celebration of self serving arguments: So if you just use GStreamer you get equal and native support on Windows and Mac as well without the user having to install, say, Phonon…

57 thoughts on “In the land of silly arguments

  1. I think Tester has the best point here. It’d be great in future if we could use gobject-introspection to produce great Qt bindings for GObject based libraries!

  2. ‘For instance Aaron Segio managed to make me laugh with his argument for why Phonon was a good alternative for non-Qt applications:

    “Phonon is also more than just an option for Qt apps: you’d be making a huge mistake not to use it. You see, Phonon gets you equal and native support on Windows and Mac as well without the user having to install, say, GStreamer..”’

    Ugh – I think one of the problems here is that this sentence is so ambiguously phrased that it can legitimately include two different parsings (for the record, like one of those pictures that can be two faces looking at each other or a vase, it actually took me several seconds to interpret it the way Chrisitian did). Adding quotes in the intended place brings the alternative meaning into focus.

    ‘Phonon is also more than “just an option” for Qt apps: you’d be making a huge mistake not to use it. You see, Phonon gets you equal and native support on Windows and Mac as well without the user having to install, say, GStreamer.’

    Suddenly, this has literally absolutely nothing at all to do with non-Qt apps – it makes no mention of them in conjunction with Phonon at all. This was the way I originally parsed it.

  3. Pingback: Christian Schaller » Blog Archive » The arguments for using GStreamer

  4. To all you GNOMErs and Gstreamers out there: why does it seem to me that you view the existence of Phonon as some kind of personal insult, directed straight at you? That because KDE-developers decided not to use Gstreamer directly, but instead they decided to use a wrapper that can use several different backends, is a somekind of monstrosity that needs to be attacked with torches and pitchforks?

    It seems to me that you think that everyone should use Gstreamer and nothing but Gstreamer, and anyone who does not do that, it a drooling moron.

    What is it with this utter hostility? Are you so annoyed that someone decided NOT to use your pet-project directly, but decided to use a wrapper instead?

    Zeeshan Ali: You seem to be particularly pissed off and hostile. What for? Because you feel that Gstreamer is somehow entitled to that much bigger share of the users, and anyone who does not embrace it 105%, needs to be viciously attacked?

    And what is this comment about: “of which you didn’t have an equivalent of in KDE world, surprise surprise”. Do we REALLY need childish attacks like that? “We at GNOME are so much better than you losers at KDE!”. That is what that comment is basically saying. And here I was thinking that the desktop vs. desktop-fighting was behind us. Congrats GNOMErs, you have demonstrated that as far as you are concerned, it’s alive and well. All that hostility, and for what? Because you wrote some piece of code and you feel that EVERYONE should be using that piece of code, and nothing but that code.

    Seriously, take a chill-pill and relax.

  5. Janne said: What is it with this utter hostility? Are you so annoyed that someone decided NOT to use your pet-project directly, but decided to use a wrapper instead?

    I’d say that it isn’t any more hostility than a large portion (but not all) of the QT camp shows towards GStreamer.

    While Christian may had taken Aaron’s “…without the user having to install, say, GStreamer..” comment the wrong way, I (and many others from the comments here) read it to mean what Christian thought as well.

  6. “I’d say that it isn’t any more hostility than a large portion (but not all) of the QT camp shows towards GStreamer.”

    Where exactly? Do you think it’s “hostility” when KDE-devels decided to NOT embrace Gstreamer and only Gsreamer? I’m sorry, but that is not “hostility”. Simply deciding not to use some system, does not mean that they are “hostile” towards that system. I do not use Mandriva (for example), but I have no hostility towards them.

    If KDE-folks went out of their way to attack Gstreamer and try to cause it harm, then they would be “hostile”. But only attacking I can see here, is coming from the Gstreamer-camp, in a form of FUD and whining. It seems to me that they have a bit inflated sense of entitlement.

    Fact of the matter is that there are lots of KDE-folks who are using Gstreamer at this very moment, through Phonon. Isn’t that a good thing, as far as Gstreamer is concerned? And fact of the matter is that there are lots of KDE-folks who are NOT using Gstreamer at the moment. Gstreamer-folks might like to see that changed, but that’s hardly a good reason to get pissed about. Should Thunderbird-devels get pissed at me because I don’t use Thunderbird? No, and they are not pissed at me. Different people use different things, get used to it.

    I with Gstreamer and it developers all the best. But really, this whining has gone too far. Others are not required to use Gstreamer. And like it or not, Phonon does make sense. I find it really strange that you are basically getting upset over a system that lets people use any multimedia-backend they prefer. You would rather see those people being forced to use Gstreamer. But when they are being provided with a flexible system that offers choice, you start to bitch and moan.

    It just boggles the mind.

  7. Yes, it seems that KDE (Qt) is criticized for taking a decision to allow other frameworks to be used instead of gstreamer (exclusively).

    And I don’t like those attacks. Gstreamer is now the multimedia API used in GNOME. If gstremer people make that into “KDE and GNOME”, they will essentially push out any other frameworks. Which would be fine if gstreamer were a superior to all of them, but IMHO it still requires work (well for me Xine worked better, and similarly mplayer).

    Also I suppose Trolltech(Nokia) doesn’t want Gst as a hard dependance, a code that’s not part of Qt. It’s also aimed at software completely unrelated to Linux and customers who will want to use native API (be it on Symbian, OSX, Windows or else, and that platform doesn’t necessarily have a Gst port).

    But I understand, pushing Gst as the only choice for Qt apps would make it default for a lot of important software and perhaps make it a player in mobile market. Not bad. Plus you get some manpower from Nokia working on it cause they depend on it.

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