As the Phonon team is hard at work to prepare for the release of Phonon 4.4.4, the GStreamer backend has seen some awesome improvements these past few days.

Not only will it be the second backend to support the experimental video capturing features introduced with Phonon 4.4.3 but has also seen tremendous improvements with regards to stability. But most importantly of all it got improved codec installation support.

If you ever found yourself looking for a way to play that mov video a friend sent you, then you will love Phonon GStreamer 4.4.4. Whenever it can not play a file because a media plugin is missing, it will now try to get it semi-automatically. Check out the screencast:

This gives user experience quite a boost, so I am most certain that Linux distributions will pick this up and integrate it nicely with their package management systems.

In the video KPackageKit is handling the plugin lookup and installation, so both Fedora and Kubuntu should have this awesome feature in their next releases.

Have fun 🙂