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Awesome Multimedia Technology Heads for KDE 98

Posted by CowboyNeal from the lights-camera-action dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Linux Devices is reporting on a cool new multimedia technology that's slated to be incuded in KDE 4.0. The two key components are Phonon, a central hardware configuration database said to free multimedia applications from the need to configure hardware, and NMM (network-integrated multimedia middleware), a distributed multimedia architecture whereby multimedia content can be readily shared among networked devices and even 'handed over' from one device to another. Potential NMM applications include networked multimedia home entertainment systems, distributed and parallel media processing applications, distributed streaming servers and services, communication and control systems, and large-scale multimedia installations such as video walls, according to the article, which includes some interesting photos and diagrams. Phonon and NMM will be demonstrated at LinuxTag, May 3-6, in Wiesbaden, Germany."
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Awesome Multimedia Technology Heads for KDE More

Awesome Multimedia Technology Heads for KDE

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  • Seriously, I'm hanging out for 4.0...
  • I saw that headline and thought it would be another Intel VIIV thing.....

  • 4.0 goodness (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Lucractius ( 649116 ) <Lucractius@NoSpAm.gmail.com> on Friday April 28, 2006 @02:36AM (#15219041) Journal
    cant wait to get the little widgets on my desktop, and all the multimedia, and its gonna be so much better to look at than vistas Aeroglass crap, and all the games... oh...

    ****

    guess its still not THAT great afterall... come on someone, put up a hundred grand prize for the first "big name title" (some criteria to exclude stuff already on linux, and crap like madden from being eligable) to provide a native Linux version. or something... pretty KDE is nice and everything but... i miss my games :(
    • I'll be waiting for 4.1... the version without bugs.
    • Quake 3, Doom 3, Quake 4, Unreal Tournament...
      • Q3 - now open source, doesnt matter if they care cause we can make our own.
        D3 - nice to see, but its one of the 2 companies that do make linux versions, but theyre exempt from this cause well... theres 2 of them... and iD do it for Philosophical reasons (carmaks big on open source as his continuing trend to open up the engines shows)
        Q4 - see above
        UT*** - nice but so what... the reason is cause its developed primarily to be licenced and theyre nice enough not to stop people buying it to develop 3d software p
        • I don't fully follow what you are trying to say about UT. How is Epic any different than id. See how Q3, and Doom 3 were made for Linux. That Quake 4 runs on it was not id's doing. Sure, one could say that id made the Doom 3 engine run on Linux, but it was Raven that made Quake 4. Raven has made several games that couldn't be run on Linux even though the id engine they were based off of could (most notably the Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy games, which were based off the Quake 3 engine). Also, Doom 3
    • Well, there's always Doom 3 for Linux. You can download it for free but you have to buy the Windows version to get the map, textures, models, music, sound effects, etc... files.

      And a few people might consider "America's Army" to be a good native Linux game too.
    • Neverwinter Nights? That alone is a great representation of the RPG genre, and some of the MMORPG market with its available persistent worlds.

      Companies can't justify a release for every platform, and many games are already segmented heavily along the various consoles and their iterations.

      If you want to play the most popular games, you either (a) have the most popular platform (for the latest games) or (b) have an emulator -- and Linux has working emulators for many (if not most) popular platforms.
      • Neverwinter Nights is 4 years old now. Considering the speed of the gaming cycle, that's practically ancient. I'm not knocking it as a game, I think it's great, but I'd love to have something new to play.I played NWN until I was sick of it about 3 years ago.
    • I know you said "Natively", but there is Cedega...www.transgaming.com. I can not live without my Guild Wars, and it works very nicely on SuSE 10 running Cedega.

  • Reversal of Fortune (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Those that do not understand {Directshow, UPnP} are doomed to reinvent them.. Poorly.
  • It all sounds really neat, but IMHO it should be a middleware layer, or something like that. It should lie *under* KDE, not be part of KDE. For that matter, it should optionally like under GNOME, or under my current non-KDE, non-GNOME icewm or xfce desktops.

    The linkage to KDE for this software layer seems inappropriate to me.

    • Re:Isn't this really plumbing? (Score:4, Informative)

      by JohnFluxx ( 413620 ) on Friday April 28, 2006 @08:12AM (#15219874)
      Um, that's _exactly_ what is happening. NMM is a middleware layer, under KDE, for gnome, and non-kde-or-gnome apps.
      Phonon is just the c++ wrapper to make it easy for kde apps to use the middleware layer.

    • Re:Isn't this really plumbing? (Score:5, Informative)

      by TravisWatkins ( 746905 ) on Friday April 28, 2006 @08:20AM (#15219899) Homepage
      Bad article (or summary). Phonon is an API a KDE app will use to do sound/video. Phonon is really just an abstraction layer. You can have an arts backend, alsa backend, gstreamer backend, even a windows backend. It's only purpose is to make audio/video easier for KDE developers and make it easy to port the whole thing to another system. It's kdelibs material, sure. But I can't see it being used by a Gnome app, they already have gstreamer (which can do arts, esd, alsa, oss, windows, etc too).
      • I would wish that with the current "desktop standards" push now going on, that standardizing middleware layers like this would be a key item. My other fear is that non-KDE, non-GNOME desktops are getting completely ignored.

        These huge monolithic desktops are an annoying departure from The Unix Way. What makes it more annoying is that it doesn't need to be as bad as it is. These middleware layers could be separated, standardized, and made generally available.

        • These huge monolithic desktops are an annoying departure from The Unix Way. What makes it more annoying is that it doesn't need to be as bad as it is. These middleware layers could be separated, standardized, and made generally available.

          Well, we've already got Gnome/KDE/XFCE (each with several WM choices) on top of GTK+/QT on top of X on top of kernel interfaces. That's enough of an onion for me. Not to mention that you can happily go off and run any number of other window managers, minus the desktop en

        • Again, this is _exactly_ what is happening.
          The sound system is abstracted out and can be used by kde/gnome/anything. The message system (dbus) is being standardised on. Kde, gnome, and other apps will use dbus.

          The only middleware part that I would want standardised on now that isn't being standardised on at the moment would be kioslaves.

          KDE is not departing away from The Unix Way at all. Please give an example of what middleware layers need to be separated etc.

        • These huge monolithic desktops are an annoying departure from The Unix Way.

          I don't think that's true at all. The "Unix Way" is to have lots of small scripts, apps, etc that all do one thing, do it well, and are constructed so as to be able to work together in order to perform more complex tasks. Your criticism of Gnome and KDE would be true if they were single, monolithic apps, but they're not. They're both composed of lots of little apps, libraries and scripts, all of which are (more or less) single-respon
  • KDE 4 may seriously cause me to switch from Gnome.

  • NMM? What about UPnP? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Andy Dodd ( 701 ) <atd7NO@SPAMcornell.edu> on Friday April 28, 2006 @09:01AM (#15220077) Homepage
    I haven't been able to figure out yet what major advantages NMM has (if any) over UPnP.

    Whether it does or not, UPnP is a standard that is beginning to be widely supported by new PC software and embedded hardware devices, while NMM is going to be stillborn unless it can achieve the market penetration that UPnP has.

    Who cares about network-oriented decentralized multimedia when nothing on the network except your PC supports it?

    The KDE developers would be much better off focusing on improving UPnP support so that KDE can "play nice" with other devices/software coming on the market, and THEN start researching replacements for UPnP.

    • Because UPnP isn't about multimedia... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Svartalf ( 2997 ) on Friday April 28, 2006 @10:30AM (#15220670) Homepage
      It's about networking and device discovery. While you need UPnP to find everything, it doesn't mesh the media playback, etc. seamlessly. NMM is more analogous to DirectPlay and probably HAS a backend for UPnP or can easily enough. If you'd have read up on what NMM was, you'd know this, though...
      • Shouldn't post this early in the morning without my IV bottle of coffee...
      • UPnP isn't about multimedia?

        I suggest you do a google search for djmount or Windows Media Connect.

        UPnP may not be solely for multimedia, but it does contain a multimedia component called UPnP AV.
        • UPnP AV is a wireline protocol (Which has A/V components to it...) for device discovery and "use", not an API.

          NMM is basically an API and is at a much higher level. To compare what we're talking about here you should really compare DirectShow, etc. with NMM, not UPnP.

          UPnP is analogous to URB's, etc. within the USB spec. You typically do not see people coding for URB's and talking to the HID layer, etc. for USB devices- unless they're making device drivers or higher-level programmer API's for the devices
  • Since multimedia is very low on my list of things to do with my computer, it's not something that will endear KDE to me.

    My GUI of choice is actually the Enlightenment Window Manager rather than any of the desktops, even then, I spend more time in a cli only environment than in an X session.
  • Oh good, a digg style headline on Slashdot.

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