[Qt-interest] running phonon video from separate process?

[Tim Dewhirst]

Hello,

Bart van Deenen wrote:
> We're building an application that among other things has to be able to
> show videos, all kinds of videos, for weeks at a time, non-stop.
> 
> Now the consensus here is that these video libraries always leak memory,
> and always crash.

How about verifying that? Perhaps get a decoder library from a 
commercial source with guarantees about performance? Always is a very 
strong word...

> Would it be possible to fork/exec the phonon stuff into a separate
> process, and render its output onto QWidgets in the main application
> window? This way, if the phonon backend hangs or eats all our ram, we
> can just kill and restart the child process.

So many questions...

What about shared memory to get the image data from the decoding 
sub-process? Perhaps it's worth considering if the decoding sub-process 
will always be on the same machine? What is the likely resolution of the 
video? SD? HD? Some non-standard format? Is passing the image data 
across UDP a possibility?

I personally wouldn't use phonon at the moment; it seems somewhat 
immature and limited in functionality and given that you seem to be 
aiming for a high availability system I wouldn't volunteer to be the 
early adopter! However, that's just my £0.02 worth.

I would personally tend to opt for the most flexible options and leave 
platform specific tricks until they were absolutely necessary.

Seasons greetings!

Tim