Since I got promoted to Lieutenant of Phonon, I have the honor of presenting a new release to you…

Phonon – the magical, terrific and powerful multi media abstraction layer used by Qt and KDE – is now available in version 4.4.3.

As the version number suggests, this release only brings minor improvements, but also a new experimental feature. This release has seen some important improvements to the PulseAudio support, which should make it more reliable and make for an all in all better user experience. Most backends also got a good deal of fixes and improvements, most notable the GStreamer backend grew the ability to navigate through DVD menus.

Last, but not least, Casian Andrei got his truly amazing Google Summer of Code Project on integrating a capturing API into Phonon merged. It currently resides in the the phononexperimental library, but I have great hopes that it will become part of Phonon proper sooner than later 🙂

I hope everyone has a great experience with Phonon 4.4.3.

Magic Glow

While I am blogging, I’d also like to write a bit about future plans for Phonon.

At this point it is time to tell you, dear reader, how I even came to contribute to Phonon – I wanted to write a good looking video player for KDE (using QML for some parts), and came to realize that Phonon does not support QML, so I went on to improve phonon-vlc and eventually ended up as co-maintainer of Phonon itself. So, obvious enough making Phonon work with QML/QtGraphicsScenes is one of the major todos for me right now, I also have a working prototype for the GStreamer backend already

Videos:

Further more we have plenty of good things waiting in the experimental part of Phonon, waiting for the final cut (like direct access to video frames, which is actually what the QGraphicsScene support builds upon).

Improvements and bugfixes to the backends are of course always work in progress and I hope to see a lot more engagement in those (rumor has it Fedora and Kubuntu consider using the GStreamer backend, surely they would help with bugfixes there? ;)).

Exciting times ahead in Phonon land. I can’t wait! 😀