Amarok - gstreamer and KDE/arts

Strapahuulia · Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2005 12:39 pm Post subject: Amarok - gstreamer and KDE/arts

Hello!

Since the arts plugin of Amarok is currently unsupported (there are no developers for it) I'm trying to switch to the gstreamer engine since I eventually found out that it's not really a Gnome thing despite of its name and it's also recommended by the Amarok team (seems to be there output engine of choice for the moment). Also, gstreamer is the only engine beside arts that supports crossfading in Amarok.

After trying several (stable and unstable) versions of gstreamer and its plugins I'm still not quite getting this system of split ebuilds for it. For the engine and most of the plugins there seems to be only one source tarball, but there are different ebuilds to provide different parts of the whole gstreamer system. So far, so good, I can imagine why the gentoo devs thought this was a good idea. I wonder though, why with these ebuilds there seems to be no way for getting gstreamer's arts output plugin (think it's called artsdsink) to install. The obvious reason is that gst-plugins calls gstreamer's configure script with "--disable-arts --disable-artstest --disable-artsc" (among a lot of other --disables). But there also doesn't seem to be an ebuild to get this plugin.

Is there any reason for this? Are the ebuild maintainers all gnome users and hence don't care about stuff KDE users might want? Should the KDE ebuild maintainers care about that but don't since they think gstreamer is a Gnome thing? Or is artsdsink just so mind-boggingly buggy and/or unstable that no one even thought about providing an ebuild for it?

Epyon · l33t Joined: 11 Sep 2003 Posts: 754 Location: NJ, USA

I haven't had good luck using gstreamer with amarok. It crashed a lot more than when using xine especially when listening to streaming audio. It also had a tendency to just hang using 99% of my cpu for no apparent reason.

Strapahuulia · Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2005 11:11 am Post subject:

So far it worked out quite well for me, even without using gstreamer's artsdsink, but instead alsasink. Since Amarok 1.2 became available, it didn't crash a single time, regardless of the output plugin I was using. Somehow, even though I'd expect it wouldn't work when using alsa for the output, KDE apps using arts are still able to use the soundcard when Amarok is playing. I don't know how this works, maybe Amarok automatically routes gstreamer's output through artsdsp, but I image using artsdsink would at least gain a bit of performance.

So that's why I still want to have this plugin working. Yesterday, I started to whip up an ebuild for that (after finding out most of the gst-plugins-* ebuilds where almost empty I thought it couldn't be such a hard thing). But somehow I keep running into problems with that. If anyone feels like helping me with that, I can post what I've done so far and the compile error I keep on getting. Or maybe the Portage & Programming Section of the forum is the better place to ask for help?

MasterMind · Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2005 8:39 pm Post subject:

I'm going to install the gst-plugins by hand..

Hope this will work

_________________
Want the best subtitles?

Podnapisi.NET, we support only quality!

Strapahuulia · Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2005 11:16 am Post subject:

Well, if you just want the artsdsink plugin like me, I've finally got something working, if you want I can post it here. But unfortunately, even though the artsdsink plugin is available in Amarok now, I can't get it to work - it just hangs Amarok

The problem is discussed in this bug report. Seems like no one really wants to use arts anymore, not even the KDE developers. Might be just rumors, since in there are no provable sources named in the discussion, but the arts project seems to be dead and arts will supposedly be replaced in KDE4. Well, actually this could be true since I found the project's website www.arts-project.org currently doesn't even work. So that might be the reason why even Amarok's arts output plugin ceased development in the first place.

Kinda bad situation right now, since KDE4 is probably not going to be released anytime soon, now that 3.4 is just out, but a good audio support is obiously a must for a modern desktop. If every multimedia project (KDE-based ones like amarok included) is abandoning arts right now, a year from now, when KDE4 might get released and have a new common sound API, no one might want to use it, since everyone meanwhile moved to his API of choice and be so accustomed to it that they're not going to change.