Phonon Now Supports Qt5, Likes VLC Over GStreamer

The Phonon Qt Multimedia Solution developed within the KDE camp for a multi-platform multimedia sound framework now prefers VLC on the back-end over using GStreamer.

Phonon 4.7.0 was released yesterday with updates to Phonon-GStreamer and Phonon-VLC. With this Phonon framework update, Qt5 is now supported beyond just Qt4. Phoronix reader Eric Griffith had also pointed out with the VLC back-end to Phonon in the new 4.7 release it has a change of "Phonon VLC is now the highest rated backend due to its high quality. This means that whenever an additional backend is installed and the user did not choose a preferred backend Phonon VLC will be used by default." Thus Phonon now prefers using VLC over GStreamer or other back-ends.

Besides the Qt5 port, Phonon 4.7 Core also features a clean-up of the documentation, API changes, build system changes, BluRay support in libphonon with the VLC back-end, a new audio output interface with PulseAudio, experimental support for building libphonon using QMake, and bug-fixes.

The Phonon VLC back-end brings support for new APIs part of VLC 2.1.0, reduced performance overhead in audio/video-less setups, an internal API redesign, partial support for the new sub-title API, and equalizer effect support.

Information on the new Phonon component releases can be found via the KDE Wiki page.