[webkit-dev] Heads up : Qt port and its multimedia support.

[Alexis Menard]

Hello,

Just a small heads up on the multimedia support for the Qt port. At
the last webkit summit I've heard some Google folks a bit confused
about our multimedia story and I'm sure others are so here is the
story :

We had a first Phonon backend, abandoned and really far from feature
completion and far from working well : I removed it with
http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/89832 as we thought it was not good
idea to let it broken on the trunk.

Then we have a QtMultimedia media player (Qt Multimedia is a separate
add-on for Qt) that was added to the tree last year to provide a more
extensive API than Phonon and supporting more platforms (Symbian).
Unfortunately Qt Multimedia lacks of stability, the quality of the
backends is really heterogenous and they behaves differently. I felt
the support was built on unstable foundations so I decided it was not
good option either.

As a fun project, QtWebKit people decided to give a try on how the Qt
port could use the GStreamer backend of webkit maintained by our GTK
friends. Main changesets related :
http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/72184,
http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/83078.

I also did the same on Mac, and it is possible for the Qt port to the
QtKit media player maintained by Apple. Main changesets
http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/87312 and
http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/89617.

Both implementation work pretty well with Qt, supports more features
than we had with QtMultimedia, have better results in LayoutTests and
make us work closer to the other webkit devs -> only benefits :D
therefore after http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/91752 the GStreamer
media player is the default on Linux and QtKit the default media
player on Mac for the Qt port. On Windows and Symbian we still use
QtMultimedia media player for now.

Our Linux implementation is already covered by a bot so now the fellow
GStreamer media player contributors should watch the Qt bots when they
work on the media player. Unfortunately for our Apple friends we don't
have yet a Qt Mac bot, though we are working on making one ready for
build.webkit.org (we do have one running but not yet at the level to
be promoted to build.webkit.org) so I will watch carefully the stuff
going on the QtKit media player.

Anyway if you have any question on the multimedia support in Qt and if
you are unsure about a change that could affect QtWebKit in either
GStreamer and QtKit, CC me on a bug or reach me on IRC.

Thanks to Eric Carlson, Philippe Normand and others who helped me to
make all of this working.

Any questions?

-- 
Alexis Menard (darktears)
Software Engineer
INdT Recife Brazil