New subject: amarok's phonon-vlc claimed to "simply sound awesome" ... why?

14 Jun 2010

KDE's "amarok" media player seems to have been improved a lot; I might
even replace 'rhythmbox' with it, now that I've gone KDE....

Looking at http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/1171-Rapid-Progress-in-KDE-Multimedia.h…
I notice the following statement:
...
  Let me sum up why exactly this new Phonon backend is
so important to us:
 Phonon-VLC is fully cross-platform, so we don't need special backends for Windows and
Mac any more
 It's already far more stable than most other existing Phonon backends
 We can now focus on creating one good backend, instead of having 10 more or less broken
ones
 It simply sounds awesome. I'm not sure why that is, but the sound quality is notably
better than with xine 
What exactly about  http://gitorious.org/phonon/phonon-vlc would make
it "sound awesome" ?
Or is there a problem with Xine that would make it sound less awesome??

Also, what's the preferred KDE backend for multimedia? In "System
Settings"->Multimedia->Backend, my system has "Phonon Xine Backend" 
(
http://www.xinehq.de/ ) as preferred, and "Phonon GStreamer backend" (
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/ ) as secondary. Is that the correct
configuration, or should I be using Phonon GStreamer backend instead?

Niels
http://nielsmayer.com