On Wed, 2002-03-20 at 13:05, Bill Eldridge wrote: > > > Eventually one project will get so much more attention than the others that it > > > will become the de facto standard. > > > > I hope so - linux needs a default multimedia architecture... > > Not really. Linux needs one or more multimedia architectures > that work. (preferably ones that are portable with Windows > as well). > > Gnome and KDE sit on my harddrive fine, and never bite > each other. Sometimes they even do coffee, though not > in public. There's a difference here. Suppose you have a commercial application. Say, opera. I can now decide to use eithet Gtk+/Gnome or Qt/KDE. Whichever I choose, I know that it will work on the clients desktop, that's all I care about. So I can choose... Whichever I choose, everyone can run it. So, no problem. Now imagine that I fork video4linux, so I have a video4linux interface 'video4linuxGerd' and 'video4linuxRonald', which are incompatible, just like Gtk+/Qt are incompatible. Now commercial company Billacle wants to make linux drivers for their winVT card. They know that they have to choose between either of the one interfaces. Making a driver for both interfaces sucks major ass, just like making opera for Gtk+ and for Qt is a bit overdone. So, they need to choose. But they know that if they make a driver for video4linuxGerd, it will only work with xawtv, and if they make a vdeo4linuxRonald driver, it will only work with my application. This sucks, because now I don't have a standard anymore, and in this case I need one. I have to choose and it won't work for everyone, it will only work for some people. Of course I can make convertors, or support both, but that's not my point. Now suppose that I have two multimedia interfaces, GStreamer and mplayer, and commercial company divx.com wants to make a linux codec. They can choose to either integrate it in gstreamer's plugin architecture or in mplayer's plugin architecture. If they choose gstreamer, only GStremer Media Player will be able to play divx, and if they choose mplayer, only MPlayer will be able to play divx. See the point? Ronald -- - .-. - /V\ | Ronald Bultje <rbultje@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> - // \\ | Running: Linux 2.4.18-XFS and OpenBSD 3.0 - /( )\ | http://ronald.bitfreak.net/ - ^^-^^
