Saturday, April 3. 2010Rapid Progress in KDE Multimedia
Lately we have made some really nice progress on the Multimedia front, and I thought it would be nice to keep our users (and other developers) a bit up-to-date with all the latest buzz. First of all, I'm happy to announce that we have finally been able to make Phonon-VLC usable and stable. Mostly we have to thank Ben Cooksley for that, who invested many hours in doing some rather complicated detective work for making this work nicely. But now we are there, and most features are working, minus some things like Equalizer support (but we'll get there too).
Let me sum up why exactly this new Phonon backend is so important to us: It is currently a bit complicated to build this backend, as it needs libVLC 1.1, which is not yet packaged by most distros. However, we plan to write a tutorial for building it, and we're also happy to help out with questions in the #phonon IRC channel. Give it a try  In other news, Amarok is making rapid progress. Only a few weeks ago we have released Amarok 2.3.0, but thanks to our extremely short release cycle (I had earlier written about this system in this article), our current ChangeLog for 2.3.1 is already rather promising. Not only will 2.3.1 come with many bug fixes and some polishing, but we'll even introduce a number of exciting new features. I'd like to give you a preview of two new features here: CoverBling Similar Artists Trackbacks
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Great! Do you know if it works with KIO, and whether it can be used in a QGraphicsView? I gather that to date, only GStreamer has done the latter, and possibly the former(?)
Kudos to everyone who has worked on Phonon-VLC
About KIO: It's not using it yet (as far as I know), but it could probably be extended.
However, VLC itself has excellent network support (this was one of the main goals of VLC itself), so it can play over HTTP and such right out of the box.
Just a question...since VLC can play just about everything under the sun wouldn't using that backend pretty much make the problem some people have with codecs a non-issue at least as far as KDE-apps go? I.e. mp3s would play out-of-the-box.
Or are there some legal problems with having say Suse or Kubuntu having installed by default in the future?
Well, it's true that VLC can play pretty much everything.
But that doesn't magically solve the licensing problem with the MP3 codec, so the distros will probably have to do the same thing that they are doing now: Making it available for download, but not bundling it.
what about gapless playback in phonon-vlc?
Already possible, planned, hard to do?
1st: the empty cover if from apple, so you should change it, i guess;
2nd: So phonon-vlc is the default one, right? No more xine?; 3rd: cool that coverbling can be fullscreen; 4th: i heard that in qt 4.7 there will be something cool for multimedia. Will you and kde use it instead of phonon?
1) Good point, thanks.
2) It's not the default, but we would like to see it become the default one day (because we don't plan to maintain any other backends, too much work). 3) Yup 4) No, because it's not that cool at all. In fact QtMultimedia is rather controversial, and not everyone is happy with it. That's why we (the KDE community) are are trying to improve Phonon.
1) yeah, i can make one for you
 2) I wish the cooles one, so i think this is that one ;D 3) Could you tell us why it's controvesial? Anyway, if you (KDE community) make phonon easy for devs and users will not have any troubels with sound in their OSes it's ok i guess. As i know, xine is the worse by now. KDE should switch to something new
The empty cover is from Apple, but that's not the only problem. Wouldn't anything sort of like CoverBling now fall under such a (albeit ridiculous) patent?
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/apple-granted-design-patent-on-cover-flow/
This is perhaps the greatest news post since the announcement of 2.0!!
This does mean that amarok will exactly sound like vlc, right? and gapless playback and cue files will be supported? and no more annoying flac file cuts? I am so pleased Can you please add an amarok wiki entry on how to install the vlc-phonon-backend from the git source for newbies. I am ready for early testing and bug reporting. The Coverbling thing is also promising, wow!! Congratulations Amarok Team!
FLAC works correctly with this backend, yes. The glitch with broken seeking is only a xine specific problem. And in all other regards, Amarok will probably sound exactly like VLC does, yep.
About the guide for installing: It's being written right now. Should appear on Planet KDE soonish.
awesome, I think this will also solve the problems that Amarok has had with seeking and playing FLAC files.
About time! It's embarrasing that I can't play my music archive properly when it's encoded with the best free audio codec there is. Hopefully this will be the default in Kubuntu 10.10.
What about the Amarok Windows builds? It looks like they have not seen any "nightly" update for one month in this repo http://saroengels.net/kde-windows/amarok-nightly/unstable/
An update including all the phonon fixes would be great.
Agreed, this could be nice. Maybe talk to the KDE Windows devs, they hang in #kde-windows on Freenode IRC.
"Artists similar to %{artist}" sounds better than "Similar artists of %{artist}".
Otherwise, it looks great! Can't wait to use it!
My pet feature from Fast Forward, the only one that wasn't ported to Amarok 2.x (similar artists), is back. Thank you
.
Great news!
I'm happy also for the "suggested artists" applet, it was in my wishlist since the switch to 2.x! Does it display suggested songs as well? In any case, thank you Mark and all the Amarok developers!
Does VLC/Phonon/Amarok support AIFF with Linear PCM 16/44? I've just bought a USB DAC and I want to try ripping my CDs to that format, and then play them through my main HiFi via a dedicated little server (GuruPlug), which won't have a GUI. So I need some sort of client/server solution where a front end like Amarok could run on my Linux laptop and control music being played on the server driving the DAC over the network. You mentioned that VLC has good network support - would that mean I could get it working with a remote server driving a DAC that was controlled by Amarok?
I'm sorry, but I really don't know this. You could ask in #videolan (the VLC channel) on Freenode. I bet they could answer this there
Amarok has to learn a lot...
Mass devices support, syncing, conversion, and eventually volume normalizatin while syncing (haven't ever met it, would be nice feature).
Well, of course there are a lot things to be done, but I'm really happy how development is going on; many updates (i.e. news updates or amarok updates) and a lot new features, which are rarely buggy (quite surprising to be honest
 ).I really hope that maintaining only one backend will make development more easy so you can concentrate on more important things.
I don't see here the link to Myriam’s blog about how to compile phonon-vlc backend, so here is it:
http://blogs.fsfe.org/myriam/2010/04/want-to-test-the-phonon-vlc-backend-here-you-go/
Coincidentally, I've started working on creating Ubuntu packages for the extra Phonon backends (VLC and MPlayer).
My VLC packages are based off of Brandon Snider's, from his "cutting edge multimedia" ppa (https://launchpad.net/~pxc/+archive/ppa). In a few days, I'm hoping to have a working phonon-backend-vlc package in place, built against the VLC's 1.1 git branch. I'm somewhat new to Debian/Ubuntu packaging, but if I'm satisfied with what I come up with, I plan on asking Brandon about simply becoming a member of the "cutting edge multimedia" team, and it should be much easier for Ubuntu users to play with Phonon-VLC. --Patrick C.
Why is the sound quality better with the vlc backend than with the xine backen?
I was using a deb package from here https://launchpad.net/~g-christ/+archive/ppa but I can't hear any difference with the vlc backend.
Hi, sounds great
Does this new backend detect which audio layer is in use at launch time or if the audio layer is switched after launch time ? I am thinking about environments where one occasionally uses jack while amarok is already running. The only thing I know can do this is pulseaudio. If one does not use PA, what are the possibilities of near "seamless" experience during an audio layer switch ? or is it too much to ask ?
Just a Question.....
What happens if the one good backend messes up? Is their another reliable one until they fix the good one? |
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