This One’s on Kovensky
Kovensky linked me a VERY interesting article, particularly for Sonictail I believe: http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2009/05/will-linux-ever-be-mainstream.html
I like how he goes on about Qt being awesome because frankly it is. Then Nokia pumped this out at the end of last year and it looks to finally be going somewhere interesting: http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/12/02/widgets-enter-the-third-dimension-wolfenqt/
The stuff in the first article is quite a good read for any tech people, especially the part at the end about how fixing the way X and *nix sound servers work coupled with Qt/OpenGL/Phonon would revolutionise gaming. I for one would love to see a natively built game using Qt like that. With a bit of simple hax it could even be rigged to work on Sony’s Phyre Engine, given it already uses OpenGL. Phonon support would not be hard to add, and if Phonon got support in the PS3 firmware Qt itself wouldn’t be far behind.
I can only see coding the PS3 interface from Sony’s part becoming easier with such a toolkit, if they are not already using it secretly internally, CyberLink seem to be.
Which actually gets me a bit annoyed. Has anyone else attempted to run CyberLink PowerDVD HD in WINE? It came with my BDROM. The first thing I noticed after it failing to do anything useful was that it used Qt, which really makes me wonder why they haven’t put out a *nix version of the software. Sure it uses custom UI blobs, but they’re all included in the binary and it should run perfectly well natively. The only problem I can see is that external software CyberLink provide, such as ArcSoft’s Home Theatre software, won’t run natively.
If a company has gone to the trouble of using a toolkit that runs in *nix, why haven’t they spoken to affiliate companies about a 3rd party native DTS-MA/True-HD decoder? Plenty of soundcards support *nix, and with it the decoding of these formats, so why are we not seeing anything? I think that article above really explains this quite well. Linux already has excelletn MPEG4-AVC decoding support, with VDPAU which even outperforms DXVA as far as GPU assisted decoding goes, why don’t we have the same thing for audio?
I seem to have answered my own question, the “audio situation” in linux specifically is terrible. FreeBSD has no problem. Solaris has no problem. OSX has no problem. Linux has OSS, ALSA, aRTS, PulseAudio, ESD… I could go on. They are all slow, they are all a pain to configure. Phonon is excellent but still acts as a server of sorts. All the factioning is destroying linux.
NB: I could be incorrect about CyberLink using Qt but I don’t believe so. Point still exists that we have the option of having an excellent OS yet factioning keeps destroying that possibility.
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My Xonar HDAV1.3 works fine in Linux, I’d love to see the Blu-ray features of it able to work natively.