Scott,

I just read the proposal for the new basic multimedia API for KDE. The 
idea of introducing channels caught my attention, because I had a similar 
idea a few weeks back.

The difference with my idea is that I wanted to use channels to group 
applications that process sound (or video) in the same way. For example, 
there could be a channel that applies an equaliser to all sound that is 
sent through it. Another channel could write a copy of all sound to a MP3 
file on hard disk. Every channel could have it's own volume control 
hardcoded into it. The idea of this kind of 'channel' is that simple KDE 
applications can support arbitrarily complex audio/video processing by 
simply allowing the user to choose which output channel to use. It would 
be ideal for Juk for instance. It could 'support' advanced audio 
processing without breaking it's nice clean GUI.

The channels could be plugins, and each channel could output to whatever 
backend it supports. That would be nice for packagers, because you only 
need to ship one basic channel definition that just sends the 
sound to whatever the default backend might be.

Implementing logical groups for notifications, music and video can be 
done by allowing applications to either choose a specific channel, or a 
specific group. The user should be allowed to configure which channel 
should be used for each logical group. An application that requests to 
output sound to group 'notification' will output to the channel 
configured by the user. You could also view a group as a specific channel 
with a specific name that is always available.

I posted this idea to KDE-Core-Devel some time ago:

http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=109281129913280&w=2

What do you think of this?

Dik
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