Its that time of the year again, and us Phonominals are gearing up for another set of releases. To start, here is Phonon-GStreamer 4.6 RC1. For the impatient, you can download it all via the KDE infrastructure, as usual.
Thunderbird by Miikka Skaffari
Its been a long while since the last release of Phonon-GStreamer 4.5.1. As such, lots of things have changed. Starting back in May, I announced that we were starting some significant retooling of PGST’s internals. In August, success was achieved and gapless playback was available. Now, we feel that we’ve worked out the majority of the kinks in that massive rewrite. The next step of course, is for some wider testing. A lot of the original phonon-gstreamer was scrapped in favor of this new playbin2 based design. If all goes according to plan, this version of Phonon-GStreamer (4.5.90, technically) will get a little more polish and then be released as Phonon-GStreamer 4.6.
For those curious, here’s a quick list from memory of what’s been accomplished between Romain and myself:
- Gapless playback
- Improved subtitles
- Misc fixes in audio fade in and out
- Fixes to KIO streaming
- A handful of fixed memory leaks
- Multichannel AudioDataOutput support
- Thread safety!
- Removed a hard dependency on ALSA
- Lots of lines of code wiped out
- Usage of playbin2 in GStreamer insead of a fragile, hand-made pipeline
- More debugging tools fort us
- More plugin installation fixes
Sometime over the weekend, Phonon (aka libphonon) will have another release. If you have problems building PGST 4.5.90, try using libphonon’s master branch. The build infrastructure changed a little bit, but that’ll get released with the next libphonon release.
I also saw a notorious CPU usage decrease (~5% before, ~3% after) with the new Phonon-GStreamer. Also, you fixed a streaming bug I was having with Bangarang.
The new release is GREAT.
Awesome, thanks. The CPU decrease is a plus since it wasn’t at all what I was aiming for. Just rewriting it all to be maintainable.
You’ve got to be kidding meit’s so tnrasparnelty clear now!
Hooray
If now the random track skipping in Amarok would stop, I would definitly switch back to GStreamer because VLC backend has poor audio quality (no equalizer et al)
I haven’t heard of the random skipping, so we’d be interested in a bug report if possible.
Hi,
Good to see this
A question. You probably know about the Phonon QML project: http://apachelog.wordpress.com/2011/08/07/dragon-player-3/ now i wonder if the QML branch is merged back in – what becomes – Phonon GStreamer 4.6?
If not, what are the plans to merge it back in if at all..?
Thanx,
Mark
The QML bits will get merged into libphonon 4.6 “when it is ready”, according to apachelogger.
At that time, the QML bits will get rolled up into the next pgst update, which will not be 4.6. Probably 4.7, to be honest.
Do you know anything about this bug?
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=273198
Hi,
I desperately need help to build this backend for i.MX53 (and hopefully get HW codecs to work in Qt). Do anymone have suggestions, a helping webpage or anything else? Help would be very appretiated!
Best regards, Jonas