[arch-dev-public] phonon: gstreamer support will be dropped

[Aaron Griffin]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 3:24 AM, Pierre Schmitz <pierre at archlinux.de> wrote:
> In short: I have tested several use cases and gstreamer seems not to be
> usable. So Id' like to disable support for it in upcoming phonon releases.
>
> My problems with gstreamer:
> * graphical glitches when playing some (most) mpeg files
> * sometimes no sound
> * bad image quality (no deinterlacing?)
> * plugins depend on gnome
> * it plays some videos with wrong aspect ratio
> * does not seem to be a phonon problem; I had the same problems with totem;
> using totem-xine fixed those.
>
> So, future versions of phonon will only have the xine-backend enabled. Maybe
> I'll provide other backends when we have the ability to split packages.
>
> If you think this is a bad idea, let me know.

I've always hated gstreamer. I used to do a lot of work with
DirectShow on Win32, which involved this whole audio-video pipeline
setup crap. I remember saying "this is terrible. thank god that linux
is much easier in this aspect". A little bit later, gstreamer came
out, which does the same sort of stuff as DirectShow did.

So, rant aside, I am not a phonon user, but I support removal of
crappy software 8)