new KDE project: PHONON

For a long time using multimedia functionality in an application posed a big challenge to most developers. It is high time for the great media frameworks that have emerged to get an easy to use, but still powerful, interface.

KDE has been using aRts  as its media framework and multimedia API since KDE 2.0. aRts has been a great framework in many ways, but didn’t manage to keep up and is unmaintained  by now. In the meantime many good alternatives have come up, including, but not limited to, libxine  gstreamer  NMM and Helix.

With Phonon  KDE developers will be able to write applications with multimedia functionality in a fraction of the time needed with one of the above mentioned media frameworks/libs. This will facilitate the usage of media capabilities in the KDE desktop and applications