[Development] The dark side of QtMultimedia

[Thiago Macieira]

On Monday 17 November 2014 20:59:54 Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Oh, and I forgot:
> 
> Thiago Macieira wrote:
> > I understand that. But applications and frameworks can't switch to a new
> > version of GStreamer overnight. Think of how long GStreamer 0.10 has been
> > in existence.
> 
> We are not asking anybody to switch "overnight". GStreamer 1 has been out
> for over 2 YEARS! (1.0.0 was released on September 24, 2012.) We are now
> finally ready to switch the whole Qt/KDE stack to GStreamer 1 in the
> upcoming Fedora 21 (i.e. over 2 years later), and QtMultimedia is the only
> missing piece. We won't be waiting for it (considering that hardly anything
> in Fedora even used QtMultimedia at all and that e.g. Phonon now supports
> ONLY GStreamer 1 in its latest release).

Right, so it's not 2 years, but it's still rather quickly. A transition of 
this magnitude should be allowed to happen progressively for several years. 
Qt 4's own transition should take 5+ years. Just remember that the Qt 3 
transition took that long and it was much less complex than 4.

Also mind you that many of the board manufacturers providing plugins for 
hardware acceleration and even MP3 support may not support GStreamer 1.0 yet. 
Dropping support for GStreamer 0.10 right now is a short-sighted decision for 
any framework.

So while I agree we should add support for 1.0 whenever resources become 
available, dropping 0.10 to make it happen is not a good idea. And again, it 
depends on whether board manufacturers are shipping 1.0 plugins or not.

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