Happy to see that TrollTech released their set of Phonon backends today, including the one for GStreamer. With the recently added Windows and Mac output plugins and codec wrappers one could even use the GStreamer backend even on Mac and Windows :)
Anyway welcome to the fast growing world of GStreamer :)
Oh, that is new…
Releasing a backend for gstreamer doesn’t contribute in any way to the “world of gstreamer”…
> Releasing a backend for gstreamer doesn’t contribute
> in any way to the “world of gstreamer”
well, it does make it possible to have any kde4 application use gstreamer with no fuss or muss (at worst changing a config option in the phonon control panel at runtime). this makes it possible to use gstreamer to service the multimedia needs of 1000s of KDE apps (well, 1000s once more of the 3rd party KDE3 apps get ported; you only get 263-ish apps with KDE4 itself, a number of those being non-gui ;). this certainly helps extend the reach of gstreamer significantly for those who wish to use it, and as such can be seen as contributing to the “world of gstreamer”.
of course, you’re not forced to gstreamer if you don’t want to (unlike the days of aRts where you could have any sound system you wanted in kde as long as it was aRts ;).
phonon isn’t quite such a broken wheel, now is it? nope, it fills exactly the hole it was meant to and is doing a rather wonderful job at it, and not at the expense of any given media solution. =)
good times all around.
Now, gstreamer is very nice, phonon is also very nice, (good job btw), but was the idea of phonon to be able to use backend xy, as arts got too old, too unmaintained?
There is now this gstreamer/quicktime/ds/xine backend plugin in phonon. (great, kde4, very nice, will become very “transportable”, what will lead, maybe, to a greater public, maybe to a greater desktop share, world domination monkeys team, eh marketing)
The use of gstreamer will dramatically increase, as gstreamer will probably be the n.1 choice in all these distributions saying, hey we don’t have to use xine anymore, gnome and kde can use gstreamer instead.
So from this point of view, gstreamer world will grow faster, will extend. Maybe the development process of gstreamer, as a side result, will get much faster.
So, now, as kde4 hasn’t been released yet, there is no real growing world of gstreamer (maybe only those who use svn kde4 & gstreamer to test the new backend).
By the way, a lot of people wait for the first “final”, if final exist, release of kde4. I’m one of them.
Hmm, well Xine still works much better for me than gstreamer. Luckily with Phonon, I have a choice. Hence the whole point of the thing.