[arch-general] phonon: gstreamer support will be dropped

[Alberto Gonzalez]

Hi,

[ This is in response to the thread in arch-devel here:
http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2009-January/009971.html ]

Regarding gstreamer support in phonon I'd like to add my 2 cents:

When you install KDE, you get the xine-phonon backend (and only the 
xine-phonon backend) by default. If someone wants to use gstreamer he must 
explicitly install it and then go to KDE control center and choose gstreamer. 
So it's not so much that you're dropping support for it (it is not supported 
by default anyway), it's rather the ability for anyone who wants to use it to 
be able to do it what you're removing. What's the advantage of that?

Some people like xine better, some don't. If you use a laptop and care about 
battery life you have to dislike xine for sure. In KDE3 I had to disable the 
sound system. In KDE4 I had to switch to gstreamer backend. At least in KDE 
4.2 they have fixed this to certain extent (i.e., no more 100's of CPU 
wakeups per seconds on an idle desktop). However, I encourage you to simply 
open Dragon player and leave it there idle while looking at powertop (and 
compare the same while using gstreamer backend). You can also play an mp3 in 
a phonon-based player and see the difference between xine and gstreamer.

By the end of the day, discussing the strengths of each backend is not so 
interesting. Xine is the default and that's good. But why remove the freedom 
to change it to gstreamer for those who want it? As far as I know, allowing 
to use gstreamer doesn't affect in any way to those using xine, does it?

Gstreamer has its problems, but it's used by all the gnome people (most 
Ubuntu/Fedora users and more) so it's can't be that bad. Not as to not allow 
users to use it if they want to.

Thanks,
Alberto.