What is the status of phonon-backend-mplayer and phonon-backend-vlc?
Are they dead by now?

I haven't heard any announcements about it, but it does seem to be decently (and recently) active:

http://code.google.com/p/phonon-vlc-mplayer/source/list

They are both in playground, maintained by two different developers:
http://tkrotoff.blogspot.com/2009/07/mp ... f-kde.html

Both backends are actively maintained (1):
- Tanguy Krotoff maintains the Mplayer backend and moves recently the source code to KDE svn
- I maintain the VLC backend

(1) http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/ ... -backends/

Just out of curiosity: is there a plan to move out of playground before the next release of Phonon?

VLC backend will be moved soon. Some people start to use it

The next Phonon release will be with Qt 4.6 and is expected by the end of 2009.

So, yes. There will be a release of VLC backend for Phonon before the next Phonon release.

Running Kubuntu 9.10, KDE 4.4.1, and there is still no phonon-backend-vlc available in any of the standard repositories.

The source code of the VLC Phonon backend can be found here now: http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc/bindings ... ;a=summary