Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amarok fade down

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Sun, 5 Feb 2012 10:02:19 -0600
Canek Peláez Valdés <caneko@gmail.com> wrote:

> > Really strange decision !  
> 
> Actually no; the GStreamer plugin architecture is really nice, and
> nowadays any GST based player can reproduce basically anything under
> the sun. VLC is not as nice (IMHO), but last time I checked it worked
> almost as good as GStreamer.
> 
> Xine was OK ten years ago; it was what I used to watch DVD's. Back
> then it was the only DVD player able to easily change subtitles
> (important to me, since back then I didn't understand spoken English).
> Then it was split into xine-ui and xine-lib, and then (if again I
> remember correctly), xine-lib was given a plugin mechanism. In other
> words, it wasn't designed; it evolved into the current form which can
> use plugins, and which is the only sane way to handle all the audio
> and video formats that come and go all the time.
> 
> In short, both GStreamer and VLC can do anything that Xine do, and
> they probably do it better. If something is not working properly, it
> probably is a problem with the integration with KDE (via phonon). This
> should be fixed by them in a short time.

You are quite correct. It is not xine itself that is moribund, it is
the phonon integration with xine that has gone nowhere for a long
while. And so that aspect of phonon has been dropped.

phonon+xine wasn't dropped in favour of phonon+gstreamer. It's more a
case of the number of phonon devs that feel like working on gstreamer
is quite a lot (relatively) but the number of phonon devs working on
xine is rather few (I believe it is actually zero), so it died.

-- 
Alan McKinnnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com