Re: Re: phonon

Dominique Michel <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.linux.gentoo.desktop
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Le Sat, 19 Nov 2011 15:34:19 +0000 (UTC),
Duncan <[email protected]> a écrit :

> Dominique Michel posted on Sat, 19 Nov 2011 14:35:18 +0100 as
> excerpted:
> 
> > I am using fvwm with fvwm-crystal. I use a few kde apps like kate or
> > kaffeine. I am also running jack all the time as sound server.
> > 
> > The only one program I get trouble with this setup is kaffeine.
> > When the sound is working fine with the old kaffeine version for
> > kde3, it doesn't work at all with kaffeine for kde4. The problem
> > seam to come from kaffeine and phonon.
> 
> > Do you know if the kde guys (the upstream for phonon for what I
> > know) do have any plan to solve this mess?
> 
> The problem with qt-phonon was that the qt guys decided to use it for 
> multimedia, then just as quickly (but after making it a part of qt4) 
> decided it wasn't really what they needed for the mobile side and
> went with qt-multimedia instead.  So it kind of got dropped as far as 
> continued improvements go, but they had to continue shipping it since
> it was now part of the qt4 api.
> 
> Of course, then nokia dropped much of their previous Linux/Qt-based-
> mobile emphasis and went with MS... kind of leaving the
> mobile-targeted qt-multimedia up in the air. <shrug>
> 
> Qt5 is under development, but I honestly haven't the foggiest what 
> they're doing with multimedia there.  Perhaps they'll fully drop
> phonon. OTOH, perhaps now that the money angle isn't driving it to
> the same extent and any further platform ports will be purely
> community driven, perhaps they'll drop qt-multimedia (or keep the
> name but integrate phonon) and refocus on the desktop.
> 
> Perhaps the best that has come out of the whole mess, is that qt
> itself is now fully free, sponsored by the qt-foundation, which was
> in turn setup by nokia, but is fully community governed and steered,
> now, with the nokia sponsored devs and other community devs now on
> the same footing -- it's a purely contributions based meritocracy now.

Nice move.

> 
> > Do you know any solution that will let me to have sound from
> > kaffeine into jack when not running kde?
> 
> I *STRONGLY* recommend that you try smplayer, instead.  Back in the
> kde3 era I swore by kaffeine myself, but back when I last tried the
> kde4 kaffeine alpha, back in the kde 4.2/4.3 era when kde and gentoo
> were dropping kde3 support (with qt3 support already long gone
> upstream), it was a castrated wimp of its former self, with barely
> the basics working, non of its former power.  Maybe it has improved
> since then, but I found something even better, for me at least, and
> haven't looked back.
> 
> I went looking for something else, and stumbled upon the qt-4 based 
> smplayer.  For me, smplayer had all the configurability and power of 
> kaffeine for kde3, if not more, and I've been using it ever since.
> =:^) As mentioned it's qt4 based, and can skin to look like a kde app
> if desired.  However, because it's only qt4, not kde4, it doesn't
> require any of the kde4 infrastructure, including the phonon that's
> giving you so much problems.
> 
> But still a couple of caveats, that might or might not affect your 
> usage.  First, smplayer is (as the name implies) mplayer based, not
> xine- based as is kaffeine.  I was originally a bit leery of that as
> I'd had problems with mplayer back in the day, but the problems seem
> to have been worked out and at least via smplayer, mplayer seems to
> be fine, now. =:^)  Second, while smplayer appears to have
> tv-tuner-card functionality similar to that of kaffeine, I don't have
> such a device, so have no idea how it compares in that regard.  All I
> know is that it /more/ than exceeded my expectations in regard to
> playing computer and dvd media, and is if anything, even more
> configurable, hotkeys, etc, than kaffeine was.
> 
> So... I HIGHLY recommend that you try smplayer.  I certainly haven't 
> looked back at kaffeine since I did.  Hopefully you'll be as happy
> with it as I've been. =:^)
> 

I like mplayer, it is the best player around with alsaplayer. They
are simple, but get the job done. I try smplayer. It lack several
functions of kaffeine like the channel search and the EPG. I used
dvbscan from linuxtv-dvb-apps for searching the channels, and now the
dvb-s part of my card work with smplayer.

I still miss the recording facility of kaffeine. It is possible to add
a dumpstream in the options, but it would be better to use mencoder for
that. With mencoder, we would have the capability to transcode the
recording to another format. 

I also have problem with the dvb-t part of the card. I finally get a
working channel list for the dvb-t. But I cannot get it to work with
mplayer. I get a workaround here :
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=913466
but when I apply it, this is the dvb-s part of the card that is not
working any more. So I have to look if I can solve it with some custom
udev rules.

Cheers,
Dominique


-- 
"We have the heroes we deserve."
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.