[Development] The dark side of QtMultimedia

[Gianluca]

Il giorno 11/nov/2014, alle ore 10:41, Knoll Lars <Lars.Knoll at theqtcompany.com> ha scritto:

> On 11/11/14 09:47, "Simon Hausmann" <simon.hausmann at theqtcompany.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> On Monday 10. November 2014 09.43.25 Holger Hans Peter Freyther wrote:
>> [...]
>>> Now really getting to my two cents. Instead of wrapping API
>>> Qt should make sure the framework can be integrated. E.g. in
>>> terms of GStreamer provide plugins that allows to easily embed
>>> video into Qt applications but ask users to use the "native"
>>> API to manage the pipeline/playback.
>> 
>> I share that philosophy and support any efforts towards making
>> integrations 
>> like that easier. In the case of multimedia that can be tricky though,
>> but 
>> that's not necessarily Qt's fault. It did take a while until gstreamer
>> had 
>> basic OpenGL texture streaming support, while frameworks on other
>> platforms 
>> have had it longer. Nevertheless once you can get hold of that, I think
>> the Qt 
>> Quick Scene Graph API is rather well suited for the graphics integration.
> 
> Well, if you’re doing a complex multimedia app, this might be the right
> approach. But for the 90% use case (show a video, play a sound, capture
> something from the camera), we can’t tell people to write 10 different
> implementations for the 10 platforms/OSes we support.
> 
> Cheers,
> Lars
> 

Dear Lars,
you are right, but Qt Multimedia is very far from achieve what 90% use case needs.
Since Qt 5.1, I wrote some small apps showing video and playing sound and capture camera, and even when the target was just one platform (iOS most of the case), Qt Multimedia failed to works and I was forced to use the native API and write a lot of code for using Qt Quick with native multimedia API that was more than the code for the rest of the app.
So, I like the Qt Multimedia approach, but it’s not usable now. For me the status is something like alpha instead of stable as it seems from the Digia’s blog.
I’ve never filed a bug regarding my situation just because a simple search on the forum will arise always with a documentation somewhere in the wiki indicating that the features was not supported on that platform.

From a user that does not need to write complex multimedia apps, but just need to show some videos and doesn’t know almost anything about the complexity of videos playback, the frustration of using Qt Multimedia module is from the lack of clear statement of all “hole” in the implementation.
I don’t know if the Qt Multimedia team has the awareness that from external point of view what appear from Digia’s blog and documentation about the Qt Multimedia is something like the holy gral of cross-platform multimedia library, but when you try to use in a toy situation just doesn’t work as expected.

For me, at the moment, Qt Multimedia is the most weakest module of Qt and at the same time is the most advertised.

Cheers,
Gianluca.