[Development] The dark side of QtMultimedia

[Thiago Macieira]

On Wednesday 12 November 2014 09:22:54 Holger Hans Peter Freyther wrote:
> Well, somebody needs to support these 10 platforms. And to make
> it worse. With things like GStreamer.. a lot depends on the used
> plugins. So any abstraction built needs to be superior to Phonon
> to help in detecting and debugging crazy vendor stuff.

I'm sorry, I disagree. People should configure their GStreamers properly and Qt 
should assume that it is working properly. GStreamer is a very complex 
framework, as you said, with lots of configuration, so figuring out what's wrong 
with it from inside the Qt layer, at runtime, is probably too much.

We should provide scripts for people to test their GStreamers, so we can 
isolate problems. If it is on GStreamer's side, we "punt" the problem to the 
Linux distribution and wash our hands off. That will make people choose decent 
Linux distributions, even for embedded systems (like Yocto). If they can't do 
that, they have the option of throwing money at the problem and paying 
consultants to fix the problem.

Note: I'm advocating this for system misconfiguration, not for systemic / 
structural problems of the frameworks. If GStreamer has bugs that affect us, we 
work around them, much in the same way we work around Bionic limitations on 
Android.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center