Hello,

- I have been working happily with phonon's xine backend that gets for me the uncomparable advantage of being pluggable to jack in two clicks.
- Considering all what I can read about xine maintenance together with the fact that gstreamer backend became the default choice with kde 4.6, I have great fears about its future.

=> I am trying to make so the other backends (vlc and gstreamer) output to Jack.

1/ vlc
- vlc by itself correctly outputs to jack in two clicks. This configuration however does not seem to impact phonon-vlc
- If I select jack among the choices I get under system-settings/multimedia/phonon/output device preference then it just displays a warning box that it does not work and automatically selects the next available device
- Of course I get a .asoundrc and there is a still opened bug (though dating from kde 4.4) about the fact that phonon-vlc is broken when one gets an asoundrc, is this still true with 4.6 ?

2/ gstreamer
- I even do not get the choice for jack in the device list.
- I of course installed gst-plugin-jack and tried to follow this howto : http://jackaudio.org/gstreamer_via_jack, replacing gconf2 by gconftool-2 but there is nothing such as /system/gstreamer in my existing tree...

Some help would be... hmmm... helpful !

At the moment I would suggest remaining with Xine as you are using KDE 4.5. I would also suggest sending an email to phonon-backends@kde.org concerning the potential for JACK connectivity in either of the GStreamer or VLC backends.

bcooksley wrote:At the moment I would suggest remaining with Xine as you are using KDE 4.5.

Thank you for answering bcooksley.
BTW, I am using gentoo-portage's kde 4.6.2 which packs phonon 4.5.0
Of course, because of my problems with other backends, I am still using good old Xine which still troublelessly fulfills all my needs.
From what I had read all around, I was just fearing about a possible discontinuation of phonon-xine backend and was trying to fiddle a possible B plan...

Ok. You should definitely contact the Phonon developers, as they may need to do some extra work to allow the backends to enable their JACK native modes.

bcooksley wrote:Ok. You should definitely contact the Phonon developers...

Well well... I did follow your advise... and... I would say that... the answer I got ("use PulseAudio and it's module-jack-sink.") did not... fill me with enthusiasm...
As a matter of fact, irrespective of pulseaudio per se, I believe that cascading 2 sound servers on my box would be... hmmm... suboptimal !

If no dedicated solution is being worked then I believe I will direct phonon-whatever to Alsa !default and, thanks to .asoundrc and snd_aloop driver, redirect this to Jack, as I already do with all my Jack-unaware softwares.

Come on Xine ! Do resist !