Two days ago Trolltech announced together with KDE that they will collaborate on development the Phonon backends for Gstreamer, Windows and Mac OS X. Working code has been handed over to the KDE repository where further development will take place.

Trolltech and KDE work together for years now: the Trolltech developers are open to KDE’s suggestions and needs, and KDE itself is a big testing framework for Trolltech’s Qt. Now this cooperation went a step further: Trolltech and KDE 4 announced that both will work together on KDE 4’s Phonon in the future.

Phonon itself is the new Multimedia framework of KDE 4 and will enable developers to easily add Multimedia playback in their applications: with Phonon developers don’t have to care about backends like Xine or MPlayer or anything else. At the same time it will be usable with different backends so that KDE users can use Xine, GStreamer or whatever they want to actually play the content. This also drastically simplifies porting of multimedia KDE applications to other platforms like Windows or Mac OS X: as soon as Phonon has platform/backend support for DirectShow or Quicktime, every KDE 4 multimedia application which uses Phonon works on there.

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