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154 lines
8.4 KiB
Plaintext
154 lines
8.4 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 823
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Title: HPR0823: Klaatu talks to Trevor, a programmer for Phonon's Gstreamer backend
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0823/hpr0823.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-08 03:03:01
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---
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Hi everyone, this is Klaatu, I'm at the Ohio Linux Fest talking to Trevor who is a KDE
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developer.
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Hi Trevor, how you doing?
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Pretty good, how are you?
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Pretty good.
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So, you work on phone on and, well, you work on phone on and what else?
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Yeah.
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Those who don't know, KDE has a multimedia abstraction library thing that basically lets
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you play multimedia with his video or audio on any platform, including OSX, Windows, and
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Linux.
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And the way it works is there's these different backends that use different libraries.
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So such, for instance, on OSX, it's QuickTime, Windows DirectShow, Linux, you have a choice
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of VLC or G-Streamer.
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And I, along with my cohort Roman Pierre, we work on the G-Streamer back in the phone
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on.
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So, what are some of the applications that a KDE user might know phone on from?
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Um, Amroch is one big thing, it is a heavy user phone on, there's also a Dragon player
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which uses phone on.
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Yeah.
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I believe Bangering uses phone on, I could be mistaken on that.
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Okay.
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K-Notify, the whole notification system uses phone on.
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Oh wow, okay.
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Um, it's all like I remember off the top of my head, I know there's more of that.
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Sure, sure.
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So, um, the advantage to me as a KDE user who knows nothing about whatever you're talking
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about right now, what does phone on give me?
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I mean, what was, why did, because phone on hasn't existed for very long, it's more
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of like a KDE4 thing, right?
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Yes.
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So, what, what is it, um, why was it necessary?
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Why did people think, oh, we should have something, you know, to do this?
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If you recall back to the original announcement of KDE4, they were talking about the pillars
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of KDE, such as things like solar for hardware, discovery, NEPO mug for some
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romantic storage, and then phone on was for multimedia, because before KDE4, we're all
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relying on this really old framework called, arts, and it was at a design similar to
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phone on, but kind of different, and it works.
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It needed pretty much rewritten from scratch to be usable in a modern system.
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So, the whole reason behind phone on is that all of KDE, not a single program has to rely
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on any specific multimedia framework.
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We don't have to hard code any codex or coding techniques or streaming APIs or anything
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like that.
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And this actually has recently come to fruition in the last week, when G Streamer, they're
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working on releasing the version one of the whole framework, and it took me about 10 minutes
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to tweak phone on G Streamer to, you know, port all the new stuff to the new system, and
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I didn't have such a single KDE application.
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Yeah, that's great.
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So, how is this different from like, I mean, to me, again, someone who doesn't know anything
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about this, it kind of sounds like Pulse Audio or something, you know, something that
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like basically sits on top of everything else, and sort of like grabs a hook or an API
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or whatever, and translates it for me, is it at all similar or completely different?
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Um, it's, I guess I would say it's different, it's not completely totally different.
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I mean, they both do multimedia.
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The big difference is Pulse Audio lets you stream raw PCM data to a sound card or just
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any abstract sound device, which could be across the network or a USB headset or something.
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Phone on handles from the loading of the multimedia from any kind of stream to the output, be it
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your display or forwarding over X11, or network connection, or audio over Pulse Audio, or
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using OSS or ALTSA.
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It handles everything from loading up the stream, decoding it, sending it out to the different
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categories, such as, you know, having voice communications go to your headset while
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music stays on the speakers, handles all of that, Pulse Audio is just audio, X video is
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just video, phone on kind of ties it all together, and makes it work on all platforms.
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Okay, cool, so right now, I mean, is phone on, is it kind of where it needs to be, is
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it kind of one of those projects that's kind of, you've developed it, it's kind of,
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it's, you can kind of set it down and let it be, or is there a lot more in store for
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phone on?
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Um, well, earlier in the year, around April, I believe, uh, Harold Sitter, Apache Logger,
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some of you may know, um, a bunch of the KD Multimedia Developers and a few other
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associated people with KDMM, we all got together in Ronda and Switzerland, the KD Multimedia
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Sprint, and there we started working on plans for what we thought we would call phone
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on five.
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Turns out we don't actually need a phone on five, but there's still some new features
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we can add, such as Blue Rate Playback, uh, actual transcoding, so you can record from
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a webcam and stream to a nice cast server or something, or just more streaming and ties
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in with the KO framework for KDE, so that even if you're back end like G Streamer or
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VLC, if it doesn't support some protocol that KDE supports, phone on will support it
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now because of this KO integration.
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Wow, nice, okay, very cool.
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Would that, by chance, help me, I mean, see, out there, what you just said almost sounds
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to me like Jack, so is that again something completely different, I mean, where I can
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sort of take streams and send them to other places, or is that not what you're talking
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about?
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Because I mean the KO thing, kind of like having something to do with that.
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Streaming to another source, um, that's actually currently done right now, but it's not
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really Jack, Jack is more for absolutely, if you absolutely need real time audio with
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zero latency whatsoever, that's what we use Jack for, and it's very routing of audio.
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Phone on when we're talking about KO streams and streaming to an output file, what's basically
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happening is you're writing to a device and you're writing to a file, which just happens
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to be in a different place, which is the kind of the same concept as Jack, but it's actually
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completely different.
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Okay.
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All right.
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So, um, since your explanation of that was so good, why do you explain to the audience
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and me, uh, what exactly the, the, the, the, the, the KO framework or whatever the KO thing?
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What, what is that?
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Essentially, it's a really cool way to support different kind of communication methods and
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network protocol and just transferring in throughout all of KDE.
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You write one little bit of libraries, say transfer files over Bluetooth, and suddenly
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every single, you know, dolphin, you've got Amorock, you've got, uh, K edit, everything
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can read and write files over Bluetooth.
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Yeah.
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And phone on leverages a little bit of that too.
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And it's seamless, which is amazing to me, because I mean, it's like, you don't even
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know, you don't even have to think about the idea that you're using that, the KO thing.
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Yep.
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And the applications themselves have no idea that they're receiving data over, like, say,
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a laser communication with the moon or whatever it comes up next.
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Yeah.
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Cool.
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Um, yeah.
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That's really interesting stuff.
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Um, how's the festival been going for you so far?
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Pretty good.
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I showed up here last night.
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I actually live about two hours away in Akron, Ohio, so, you know, it's not that far of
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journey for me.
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I met a couple of cool people here, hung out with a couple of friends back from Akron.
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Cool.
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I met a couple of neat people here, saw some talks.
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I like the keynote looking forward to the rest of the day.
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Cool.
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Um, oh, what, what district are you running?
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What's your, you know, just, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what,
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what you see by the, uh, you on my arm here, of course.
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I happened to be a Fedora ambassador, and I do a little bit of Fedora packaging on the
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side.
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Nice!
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Okay, cool.
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Well, thanks for talking to me, sir.
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Yes, thanks.
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Thanks.
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Thanks a lot.
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