VLC With Phonon Back-End Is Now Ready For Use

[RealNC]

Phonon devs are - IMHO - simply incompetent. They switch from lib to lib, can't get it to work, and now they try to settle down to something that doesn't even work correctly and has a hostile upstream towards KDE anyway. And between all that, Phonon's API sucks major.

Bah.

[KAMiKAZOW]

Phonon devs are - IMHO - simply incompetent. They switch from lib to lib, can't get it to work, and now they try to settle down to something that doesn't even work correctly and has a hostile upstream towards KDE anyway. And between all that, Phonon's API sucks major.

Bah.

What are you talking about? Phonon's officially endorsed back-end since KDE 4.0 was Xine. From now on it's VLC. Changing the endorsed back-end after almost three years is hardly anything that constitutes constant lib switching.
GStreamer, QuickTime, and DirectSound back-ends are also available but were not developed by KDE but by Trolltech/Nokia and were never endorsed by KDE except a general ?choice is good? statement.
If something never really worked on my boxes, it was that stupid GStreamer back-end but since GStreamer-using GNOME apps also never worked for me, it's hardly Phonon's fault.

I use the VLC back-end since several months. Even the untested git builds always worked better than GStreamer.

The only incompetent developers are the GStreamer ones.

[Remco]

If there's any incompetence, it's the posters on Phoronix.

[Mr_Alien_Overlord]

Burn! Burn ALL the backends! Let's start a new one and hard code it everywhere! And make it play subtitled visualisations of time seek'ed oggs! And create a new distro to go with it! And a Kernel.. Burn, I tell you all! Burn! Burn! BURN! Ahahahahahahaha!!!!

Ok. Time for me to get some sleep....

[rvdboom]

Just tried it with the later stable VLC and 0.3.1 phonon-backend.
On the whole, it works well, thoufg there are still some few glitches here and there :

- Dragon Player can only play the first audio track in a MKV file, while I have no problem listening to different tracks with the xine backend.
- When moving with the position slider within a film in MKV format, the image positioning is instantaneous, but the sound takes up to one second to start at the correct place.
- While Mark Kretschmann, the main Amarok developper, says that sound is louder with phonon-vlc, I have the opposite feeling, at least as far as the movies I quickly tried.

But on the whole, it seems quite good.
Anyway, since xine development seems to stall a bit these last years, it's good to know that in case it stops, I should be able to switch to another backend easily.

[KAMiKAZOW]

Dragon Player can only play the first audio track in a MKV file, while I have no problem listening to different tracks with the xine backend.

Early Phonon applications in some cases talked to Xine directly in order to overcome what were then Phonon's limitations. It could be that Dragon Player still has that code. AFAIK Dragon Player isn't even maintained any more.
You could use VLC directly, though.

[kraftman]

Definitely not placebo. It sounds better. I remember reading somewhere about the explanation of it. Something about VLC doing a better job at channel mixing, gain control etc. And of course my ears after comparing both say vlc is better...

I've noticed the same thing when I switched from xine to vlc for the first time.

[kraftman]

Stop spreading FUD please...

Gstreamer is fine. Your problems belong to the phonon-gstreamer backend, not gstreamer itself. Have you ever used gstreamer in gnome? It just works, without problems.

KDE user here, former GNOME user, just don't like the FUD.

Some people said they had problems with gstreamer in Gnome. I also had problems with sound in Gnome in the past. It seems 850Mhz CPU wasn't enough for gstreamer while xine worked as supposed.

[kraftman]

It's sad Kubuntu is shipping with gsucker for default...

http://www.kubuntu.org/news/natty-alpha-1

[rvdboom]

Early Phonon applications in some cases talked to Xine directly in order to overcome what were then Phonon's limitations. It could be that Dragon Player still has that code. AFAIK Dragon Player isn't even maintained any more.
You could use VLC directly, though.

Maybe you're right.
I happen to like Dragon Player. As far as music is concerned, I use Amarok as dealing with thousands of files which last about 5 minutes is tedious. But for movies, I prefer to organize them properly in folders, then navigate using Dolphin and watch them with a simple, fast-loading player. Dragon Player does just that and I guess it's simple enough not to need much maintainance. It's perfect for my use.