/Kretz/blog/

Today I went to Saarland University in Saarbrücken where the NMM work group was awaiting me. They had invited me to talk about Phonon and how to integrate NMM for KDE4. Their plan is to put manpower behind getting a Phonon-NMM backend done till May and getting the full power of NMM available to all of KDE. I'm really excited about this as on the one hand it will provide me with a full featured (and I mean "full") backend to work/play/test with and on the other hand it will finally start to expose NMM to the masses which will hopefully make NMM as reliable as needed for a KDE backend. Expect a full announcement from them soon.

Also they asked a lot of questions and made comments that I really need in order to flesh out the interfaces. Sometimes I wish there'd be more people I could discuss about the API with. Or that somebody would just ask questions in order to understand the API. Both is really helpfull to my work and results in better thought-out interfaces.

Finally I have a simple backend implementation where I can concentrate on correct behavior and not so much about producing audio or video output. In the Phonon branch of kdelibs is a fake backend implementation that mostly uses QTimer to model how a real backend would work. My old test-programs testing the states and playback functions showed that the backend is behaving nicely so far.

This is the first step to creating a suite of unit tests for Phonon. These tests are important to verify whether a backend works correctly. With this test suite it should be possible to (kind of) certify backend implementations.

Also I finally got the ByteStream interface done. I'd really like to see some review on it though: bytestream.h. So if you think this will fulfill all your needs let me know, and even more if you think that something you think it should be able to do isn't possible.

First of all, sorry for not writing about KDEMM for such a long time. I promised to write as soon as my server would be back up, but didn't. Anyway, I hope to be able to provide a more or less constant stream of information about the progress.

From now on the name KDEMM will be history and the new name is "Phonon". The word phonon is normally used in quantum mechanics for quasiparticles that describe a quantized mode of vibration in a solid. Phonon will be all about creating those real phonons.

For those who followed the search for a new name: At aKademy there were a few suggestions from which I already had adopted kdem²m, which, till now, was used for the name of the working branch in SVN. But after having to type KDEM2M or Kdem2m very often while programming I really got fed up with the name.

I hope you all like "Phonon" as much as I do.