Use of GStreamer or XINE as Multimedia Framework

[Niki]

Hello,

I had just discovered MusikCube and Just loved it. It is a lot like
Rhythmbox for Linux. Light and easy to use and not a Memory and CPU
Beast like Songbird, which by the way is a total disappointment for
me. Anyway, I was very disappoinded that MusikBox 1.0 is not being
further developed, but I fund out about this project. I see it is
still in a very early stage and i just want to give some suggestions
on how you can speed up the development.

Personally I believe writing a completely new sound engine or
multimedia framework is a very time consuming, and you should consider
using already well established frameworks like GStreamer and XINE. Is
there a particular reason why you don't use them. They are the
foundation of many good players including Rhythmbox. Support many
formats and protocols and are open source and platform independent. So
I think if you go with them you will save a lot of development time.

Another thing is the UI writing a C++ Win API is probably a good idea
but again very time consuming i believe, you should definitely
consider using a toolkit like FLTK or QT.

I believe what really make MusikCube so great is the UI and you should
focus on that by reallying on strong foundations like the frameworks
and toolkits mentioned above.

If you go in this direction I will most probably contribute some code
in the future.

I am eager to hear what you thing about my suggestions.

Regards,

Nikolay Georgiev
Department of Computer Science
University of Wuerzburg, Germany

[doep]

Hi!

I've been looking some at GStreamer before and think they are doing a
great library. Although, we have a pretty good audioengine in mC2 that
supports everything like gapless playback, dsp and several different
decoders already. I can also see some potential in using our own
engine when it comes to more advanced audio plugins like cross beatmix
plugins or for stuff like needs more integration with the rest of the
app. The only thing that needs rewriting for our engine to be totally
cross platform is the output plugin, and I can't imagine writing one
for linux would be very difficult.

Regarding GUI library, we will most likely change to QT very shortly.
Some experiments are being done at this very moment, and we will most
likely change :)

We could really need some more helping hands. If you have the time,
please stop by the IRC channel.

Best regards
Daniel (doep) Önnerby