Awesome Multimedia Technology Heads for KDE

An anonymous reader writes "Linux Devices is reporting on a cool new multimedia technology that's slated to be incuded in KDE 4.0. The two key components are Phonon, a central hardware configuration database said to free multimedia applications from the need to configure hardware, and NMM (network-integrated multimedia middleware), a distributed multimedia architecture whereby multimedia content can be readily shared among networked devices and even 'handed over' from one device to another. Potential NMM applications include networked multimedia home entertainment systems, distributed and parallel media processing applications, distributed streaming servers and services, communication and control systems, and large-scale multimedia installations such as video walls, according to the article, which includes some interesting photos and diagrams. Phonon and NMM will be demonstrated at LinuxTag, May 3-6, in Wiesbaden, Germany."

Re:"KDE 4.0: Now even more bloated!"

[mabinogi]

how does kbattleship bloat KDE?

KDE consists of kdelibs + kdebase. Everything else is optional.
In fact, if you want to run an individual KDE application without the desktop environment, then even kdebase is optional.

If you try to install all of the packages that the Debian KDE maintainer has decided are part of "KDE", then what a suprise, you get ALL of them.
The big heap of dependencies you listed are 90% individual KDE applications that you are completely free to install or not.
If that is difficult, then that is an issue with the packaging of KDE on your distribution, not an issue with KDE itself.

See if there is a "kde-base" meta package you can install - if you do that, you'll get the much smaller set of applications that comprise the core of KDE, and then you can cherry pick the other applications that suit your needs.

Re:Sure beats ARTS, anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

It tends to block non-aRts apps from using the sound device. Largely games and multimedia apps.

Hence the common: "killall arts && quake"

Now even more bloated, if you want it to be..

[Ajehals]

If you don't like it don't install it, if your using Linux select the packages you want not the 'KDE' meta package with "all the official packages" takes a little longer but works just as well, hell if your really worried put together a metapackage of your own with just the bits you want, and none of those you don't. Yeah you will hit some issues with dependencies but not all that many, and you can get rid of a huge amount of bumf if you don't want it, I'm happily using a lightweight KDE with components of my own choosing, but if I install KDE on someone else's PC they tend to get the whole lot, and are generally happy.

Oh and for people who are not worried about bloat and people new to Linux its all "nice features" trying to make KDE attractive to people is not a bad thing, especially when you want to have all the latest wizz bang stuff.

After all Linux gives you choice, its not like you can get rid of all the boat in Windows or even the gnome metapackage...

Just my view

Re:"KDE 4.0: Now even more bloated!"

[Chainsaw]

Installing KBattleship in Gentoo, with no previous KDE packages installed, would give you three things: kdelibs, libkdegames and kbattleship. If the dependency system on your Linux distribution tries to pull in more, bug the package maintainers.

Re:Isn't this really plumbing?

[JohnFluxx]

Um, that's _exactly_ what is happening. NMM is a middleware layer, under KDE, for gnome, and non-kde-or-gnome apps.
Phonon is just the c++ wrapper to make it easy for kde apps to use the middleware layer.

Re:Isn't this really plumbing?

[TravisWatkins]

Bad article (or summary). Phonon is an API a KDE app will use to do sound/video. Phonon is really just an abstraction layer. You can have an arts backend, alsa backend, gstreamer backend, even a windows backend. It's only purpose is to make audio/video easier for KDE developers and make it easy to port the whole thing to another system. It's kdelibs material, sure. But I can't see it being used by a Gnome app, they already have gstreamer (which can do arts, esd, alsa, oss, windows, etc too).

Because UPnP isn't about multimedia...

[Svartalf]

It's about networking and device discovery. While you need UPnP to find everything, it doesn't mesh the media playback, etc. seamlessly. NMM is more analogous to DirectPlay and probably HAS a backend for UPnP or can easily enough. If you'd have read up on what NMM was, you'd know this, though...