VLC With Phonon Back-End Is Now Ready For Use

There's long been a desire by KDE users to have a Phonon back-end for the VLC media player (there's 4 year old bug reports on the matter) and just now there is finally a Phonon-VLC release that is considered "stable enough for day to day use." Phonon-VLC is a version of VLC that uses the Phonon back-end from KDE4 as it's back-end. This multimedia API was originally provided by KDE libraries and then integrated into Qt is abstracted and can then target a particular multimedia back-end like GStreamer or Xine.

Phonon-VLC is now at version 0.3 and is said by its developers, "We now consider the Phonon VLC backend stable enough for day to day use and encourage everyone to give it a try." Mark Kretschmann, the founder of KDE's Amarok media player, also said, "Phonon-VLC is rock solid now. Not a single crash in two weeks. Smooth as butter."

Phonon-VLC is also the first Phonon back-end to integrate audio and video capture support for Phonon that was developed as a Google Summer of Code project.

Additional details on the Phonon-VLC 0.3 release can be found in this blog post along with source download links.