[Development] The dark side of QtMultimedia

[Gianluca]

Il giorno 15/nov/2014, alle ore 18:54, Nichols Andy <Andy.Nichols at theqtcompany.com> ha scritto:

> Hi Kevin and others,
> 
> I still think that this discussion has derailed.  I do not think Phonon is the solution to fix or replace QtMultimedia so I hope to make this clear so we can move on to a real solution.

Dear Nichols Andy,
your post was fantastic, it made clear the situation of current state and alternatives.
But, what would be the solutions ?!?! 
I’m really new to this mailing-list and I decided to join because I get a problem with QtMultimedia and looking on the documentation and asking on the forum I didn’t found my answer and everyone suggested to me to use the development mailing-list. And, just after I joined this discussion appear :-) What a coincidence :-)

The problem is that there is no clear evidence of development planning and improvements. As Callegari said in this email, he filed various bugs long time ago and they still there without any evidence of planning. From my side, I’m stuck on an limitation of VideoOutput on iOS that it’s still there from one year and I don’t see any planning of resolving the issue.
So, from my point of view, the QtMultimedia seems abandoned (I hope it’s a wrong deduction from a superficial view of the project). The indication of that deduction comes, for example, from the wiki page about backend supports (http://qt-project.org/wiki/Qt_Multimedia_Backends). That page was not updated for a long time giving the impression that no work has been done to improve the QtMultimedia. 
In that table, there are a lot of “holes" and for each “hole” there is no indication if the “hole” has been planned to be resolved and in which Qt version, or if it is an “hole” impossibile to solve. So, it seems that better than this it’s not planned.

For example, no one told me (even in this mailing list) if the VideoOutput limitation on iOS it’s impossible to solve or it’s planned to be solved in some Qt versione (i.e. Qt 5.5)

Since Qt 5.1, at each new release I’ll look into new features and improvements and what you can see is a very different pace of some modules respect to others and the QtMultimedia is always one of the slowest one in improvements and fixes.

So, why there is so few resources and/or interest on developing the QtMultimedia module ? For me, it seems a very fundamental module that I’m really surprised that Digia’s do not commit strong resources on developing it.

QtMultimedia has an very ambitious objective, and I think it cannot be good improvement just only hoping from community contributions, and there will be no good improvements if Digia (or some other big company) commit resources on it.

Cheers,
Gianluca.