[Development] The dark side of QtMultimedia

[Massimo Callegari]

Massimo Callegari wrote:
> I am well aware you guys do your best to provide a quality
> cross-platform framework and so far you did an excellent job !
> Unfortunately I cannot say such thing for the Qt Multimedia module. If
> you stick to the provided examples (properly tailored to hide all the
> bugs) they all almost work. If you try to use the multimedia
> functionalities in a serious project and try to deploy it, then the pain
> comes around.
> I found Qt Multimedia buggy, unsupported and moreover not cross-platform.
> 
> I am the maintainer of an open source project and so far I provided
> multimedia audio input/output on Qt4 using ALSA on Linux, WAVEIN/WAVEOUT
> on Windows and PortAudio on OSX.
> In the last 9 months I tried to switch to Qt5 Multimedia and opened a
> number of issues on JIRA and none of them has been resolved or taken
> into account.

>> Have you considered using Phonon? Not the ancient version bundled with Qt 4, 
>> but the real thing, directly from the KDE developers? It can also be built 
>> against Qt 5 now.
>>
>>        Kevin Kofler
Hello again,I'm glad that the topic I raised is somehow of interest, but I noticed that, as usually good technicians do, you guys went straight into techy bits, forgetting what the original post spotted.They say that when you are aware of a problem you have it 50% solved.What concerns me is the remaining 50%, and since plans (and money) move this world, I would kindly ask if someone is in charge of making a plan to address the QtMultimedia issues and making it a quality part of the Qt framework.
For example, what sounds a good plan to me is something like: we'll dedicate the necessary resources to close all the JIRA issues for version 5.5. OK...80% would be fair enough :)Just an example that includes numbers and a time line.
Discussing the bits without a plan, is like discussing the sex of the angels (like we say in Italy) as nobody will do anything in the end.
Random notes on the various replies:- 2 years ago, Phonon was exactly the reason why I decided to write my own implementations on Qt4. I was scared of the consequences of deploying on 3 platforms with it (IF that was ever possible). Maybe now the situation is different, but there's Android and iOS and I still would not go to Phonon anyway.I don't understand why everybody wants to walk their own way. Why can't you Phonon guys help on QtMultimedia (you could have joined in 2012...) instead of advertising a module by telling people which flags they need to use to build it ? Are you aware of how difficult it is to build ANYTHING with MinGW on Windows ? (and no, I won't use M$ compilers, thanks)
- I agree with everybody that cross-platform multimedia integrations are a tough job and a quite delicate matter. But once it's done it's done and the bright side of the thing is that Qt has a super vast community that gives feedback on different OSes, hardware and usages.
- I super agree with Lars. The Qt promise of writing code once and deploying everywhere is the key of it all. If this isn't met, then it's not Qt anymore.
- I haven't really got an opinion about issues-oriented donations, but you might end up having 200 $20 donations for 200 different issues. Then which one will you solve first ?
Cheers,Massimo
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