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List:       kde-multimedia
Subject:    Re: noatun and KDE 2.1
From:       Neil Stevens <multivac () fcmail ! com>
Date:       2000-11-26 1:51:13
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On Saturday 25 November 2000 05:23 pm, Charles Samuels wrote:
> On lørdag 25 november 2000, 09:44 am, Stefan Westerfeld wrote:
> > I just went through all of them, and from the aRts side of things,
> > there is nothing much left to do in the 2.1 branch. The worst crashes,
> > symlink issues etc. have been fixed in the CVS. We do have a mp3
> > performance problem against xmms though. But all this doesn't impact
> > whether or not we should release noatun.
>
> I consider that a non-ship :)  What'l happen is that people will think
> kaiman is a totally different thing than noatun.  Then they notice "ugh,
> this is just as slow as the old KDE Media player," and forever are we
> doomed into being the slow as all hell.  Now, *I* for one can use it,
> but I also have a 300mhz CPU entirely devoted to arts (which comes in
> very handy for my Vorbis files :)  But the fact is, we all compile our
> source so have enourmous machines.  But you also forget that people are
> going to be coming in with Pentium 200MMX systems and will barely be
> able to use it.
>
> Let's put it this way:
> I ran winders95 on a P133.  I play MP3s just fine.  I switched to linux,
> and kmp3 could play MP3s file.  Now I use a dual P2/300, and I don't
> mind a media player that takes 20% of my entire computer (that's 40% of
> a P2/300)

Well, that's fine, but arts and mpeglib_artsplug are already shipped.  
Whether Noatun is ready to replace kaiman is orthogonal to whether arts is 
ready to replace [some media player] on slow machines.

> Another issue I have is lack of portability.  It should work on all
> platforms, even if it doesn't work well.

Again, mpeglib for arts is already shipped.

> Basically, I don't want noatun to forever be seen as the "slow as all
> hell" media player.  Even if it gets far better, users will always
> associate it with "slow."  Fortunately, most users will not associate
> kaiman with noatun.

Aha!  The real issue.  You don't want *Noatun* to give a bad first 
impression, in the same way that Kaiman has given a bad first impression 
to many people.  That's understandable, but I don't think that's a valid 
reason not to ship Noatun in KDE 2.1. 

Here's my suggestion:  Now that I can actually run Noatun again, I'm 
getting on the UI things I want in the first released Noatun.  If 
someone can add the artsd [re]start support to Noatun's Engine class, and 
Charles can get off of his break long enough to send me an email on how 
*he* wanted to fix the mime-type issue, we just might be able to get 
Noatun feature-complete in a week.

-- 
Neil Stevens
multivac@fcmail.com
neil@qualityassistant.com

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