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Awesome Multimedia Technology Heads for KDE

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the lights-camera-action dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Linux Devices is reporting on a cool new multimedia technology that's slated to be incuded in KDE 4.0. The two key components are Phonon, a central hardware configuration database said to free multimedia applications from the need to configure hardware, and NMM (network-integrated multimedia middleware), a distributed multimedia architecture whereby multimedia content can be readily shared among networked devices and even 'handed over' from one device to another. Potential NMM applications include networked multimedia home entertainment systems, distributed and parallel media processing applications, distributed streaming servers and services, communication and control systems, and large-scale multimedia installations such as video walls, according to the article, which includes some interesting photos and diagrams. Phonon and NMM will be demonstrated at LinuxTag, May 3-6, in Wiesbaden, Germany."

3 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. Awesome Multimedia Technology? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    I know this new multimedia technology is awesome, but I need to know, is it mad crazy, too? The submitter forgot to say.

  2. Re:DRM? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
    Two words: Trusted Computing. Big fans of this include all the major tech companies like Microsoft, IBM, Intel, AMD... second-tier ones like Sun, Apple (have you bought a new Apple Intel Mac? Congratulations -- Apple included this Big Brother chip in your machine. And didn't tell you)

    Essentially, it boils down to this: the PC hardware itself checks whether you are running the right binaries, and if not, the other end (be it across the internet or a Blu-Ray/HD-DVD drive or anything else with a TC chip included) won't trust you and you don't get the content. Basically, you can't fork the code because it won't work anymore, as you don't have the key to sign the binary and make the hardware trust it.

    It also, just as a bonus, lets companies like Fluendo take Free software, make deals with content owners to only work with *their* signed binaries of Gstreamer. In other words, taking Free software and making it proprietary. It's the same thing that Sun is doing with its "open source" DRM... that relies on TC hardware to ensure that you haven't just recompiled their "open source" to remove the restrictions and controls. Naturally, Fluendo and Sun are buddies, and Fluendo has signed up to Sun's version of "open source". Amusingly, Christian Schaller (Fluendo) used to be a big critic of people abusing Free software by calling it "open source" and wrote articles imploring others not to use it. But then he started to get corporate money... and now he's quite happy to steal other people's code to make his DRM framework.

  3. NMM? What about UPnP? by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I haven't been able to figure out yet what major advantages NMM has (if any) over UPnP.

    Whether it does or not, UPnP is a standard that is beginning to be widely supported by new PC software and embedded hardware devices, while NMM is going to be stillborn unless it can achieve the market penetration that UPnP has.

    Who cares about network-oriented decentralized multimedia when nothing on the network except your PC supports it?

    The KDE developers would be much better off focusing on improving UPnP support so that KDE can "play nice" with other devices/software coming on the market, and THEN start researching replacements for UPnP.

    --
    retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?