Dominique Michel posted on Sat, 19 Nov 2011 14:35:18 +0100 as excerpted:
> I am using fvwm with fvwm-crystal. I use a few kde apps like kate or
> kaffeine. I am also running jack all the time as sound server.
>
> The only one program I get trouble with this setup is kaffeine. When the
> sound is working fine with the old kaffeine version for kde3, it doesn't
> work at all with kaffeine for kde4. The problem seam to come from
> kaffeine and phonon.
> Do you know if the kde guys (the upstream for phonon for what I know) do
> have any plan to solve this mess?
The problem with qt-phonon was that the qt guys decided to use it for
multimedia, then just as quickly (but after making it a part of qt4)
decided it wasn't really what they needed for the mobile side and went
with qt-multimedia instead. So it kind of got dropped as far as
continued improvements go, but they had to continue shipping it since it
was now part of the qt4 api.
Of course, then nokia dropped much of their previous Linux/Qt-based-
mobile emphasis and went with MS... kind of leaving the mobile-targeted
qt-multimedia up in the air. <shrug>
Qt5 is under development, but I honestly haven't the foggiest what
they're doing with multimedia there. Perhaps they'll fully drop phonon.
OTOH, perhaps now that the money angle isn't driving it to the same
extent and any further platform ports will be purely community driven,
perhaps they'll drop qt-multimedia (or keep the name but integrate
phonon) and refocus on the desktop.
Perhaps the best that has come out of the whole mess, is that qt itself
is now fully free, sponsored by the qt-foundation, which was in turn
setup by nokia, but is fully community governed and steered, now, with
the nokia sponsored devs and other community devs now on the same footing
-- it's a purely contributions based meritocracy now.
Meanwhile, while kde-5 is already under development, they're making this
one a MUCH more incremental upgrade and AFAIK will keep kde-phonon. Time
will tell whether they learned the lessons of the kde3 -> kde4 upgrade or
whether they're simply making a bunch more empty promises that will be
out like yesterday's bathwater. One thing I know for sure is that they
have about zero credibility left to lose at this point, so one way or
another, it'll get better: they either pay attention to their users or
they'll end up much like xfree86 did when xorg took off.
But... phonon /should/ be able to be run independently of kde, since that
was the idea from the start, both for kde-phonon, and with qt-phonon.
For me, however, kde4, now USE=-semantic-desktop and without akonadi,
nepomuk, etc (I migrated to claws-mail for mail and run a separate
instance of it for my feed-reader so no kdepim to pull in akonadi at all,
and I was thus able to kill semantic-desktop entirely), is still my
desktop of choice, so I'm running phonon with it and thus will be about
zero help in trying to run it independently. But I believe I can still
be of help, see below. =:^)
> Do you know any solution that will let me to have sound from kaffeine
> into jack when not running kde?
I *STRONGLY* recommend that you try smplayer, instead. Back in the kde3
era I swore by kaffeine myself, but back when I last tried the kde4
kaffeine alpha, back in the kde 4.2/4.3 era when kde and gentoo were
dropping kde3 support (with qt3 support already long gone upstream), it
was a castrated wimp of its former self, with barely the basics working,
non of its former power. Maybe it has improved since then, but I found
something even better, for me at least, and haven't looked back.
I went looking for something else, and stumbled upon the qt-4 based
smplayer. For me, smplayer had all the configurability and power of
kaffeine for kde3, if not more, and I've been using it ever since. =:^)
As mentioned it's qt4 based, and can skin to look like a kde app if
desired. However, because it's only qt4, not kde4, it doesn't require
any of the kde4 infrastructure, including the phonon that's giving you so
much problems.
But still a couple of caveats, that might or might not affect your
usage. First, smplayer is (as the name implies) mplayer based, not xine-
based as is kaffeine. I was originally a bit leery of that as I'd had
problems with mplayer back in the day, but the problems seem to have been
worked out and at least via smplayer, mplayer seems to be fine, now.
=:^) Second, while smplayer appears to have tv-tuner-card functionality
similar to that of kaffeine, I don't have such a device, so have no idea
how it compares in that regard. All I know is that it /more/ than
exceeded my expectations in regard to playing computer and dvd media, and
is if anything, even more configurable, hotkeys, etc, than kaffeine was.
So... I HIGHLY recommend that you try smplayer. I certainly haven't
looked back at kaffeine since I did. Hopefully you'll be as happy with
it as I've been. =:^)
Meanwhile, back to phonon, if it's still needed after you try smplayer...
I had some problems with phonon-xine too. As you mention, it's
deprecated and doesn't get a lot of love, these days. There's other
backends, however.
phonon-vlc is the one I use. Of course, that means installing yet
another media player, but phonon-vlc works well, here. (At least on my
main machine, however, smplayer still works better than vlc, tho. But on
my netbook with its much lower resolution and Intel based graphics, I had
some problems with the various smplayer video backends, and vlc seems to
bypass them so works better, there.)
The upstream default phonon-backend is phonon-gstreamer, probably because
so many distributions ship gnome by default, thus making gstreamer the
best integrated phonon-backend for them. But as with mplayer, I had
problems with gstreamer back in the day, and haven't had it on my system
since. Very likely, again just like mplayer, the problems are long
worked out and gstreamer would be fine, but as I'm sure you know, gentoo's
build-from-sources approach tends to encourage the good security practice
of only installing what you actually use, and I've simply never needed to
try gstreamer since I had those problems, as there have always been other
working alternatives.
So if you need to keep phonon, do try one of the other backends, either
phonon-gstreamer or phonon-vlc, depending on what fits in best on your
system. Either one is likely to work better than the deprecated phonon-
xine. I know phonon-vlc has solved my problems here, and when others
have reported problems with their backend (mostly on the kde lists, a
couple of which I'm a regular on) and I suggested switching, some of them
chose phonon-gstreamer and reported back that it solved their problems.
But OTOH, I've had a couple people who were on the gstreamer backend
report problems, that went away when they switched to a different one.
But there's at least the three to choose from, so if one has problems, do
try another. I've never had anyone that reported failure with all three
backends, tho that was in the kde context, and your problem may not be
the backend, but phonon/kde4 itself. Still, it's worth giving the
different backends a try, if you still need phonon after giving smplayer
a try, anyway.
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman