Phonon

Tutorial Factbox

Time to replay	20 min
Example Distro	SUSE Linux 11.3
Type	Howto
Happy readers	2
Unhappy readers	0

Introduction

The following is based on the documentation available here Phonon API.

By getting involved with Phonon, you can choose between three different main tasks.

• Using the Phonon API, which allows you to develop your own multimedia application. In fact any application which needs sound can take benefits from the phonon API.

• Hacking the Phonon library.

• Writing Phonon backend, this consists in writing interfaces that allows Phonon to use different sound/video engine. This usually requires good skills and knowledge of the engine you interface with.

Beginners will probably be more interested by the first task.

Using the phonon API

The following example is taken from http://www.englishbreakfastnetwork.org/apidocs/apidox-kde-4.0/kdelibs-apidocs/phonon/html/index.html. It plays /tmp/example.wav. To change the sound device that is used by default, use the command systemsettings.

CMakeLists.txt

You need a file CMakeLists.txt to compile the software later:

CMakeLists.txt
project (tutorial2)
find_package(KDE4 REQUIRED)
include (KDE4Defaults)
include_directories(${KDE4_INCLUDES})
set(tutorial1_SRCS tutorial2.cpp)
kde4_add_executable(tutorial2 ${tutorial1_SRCS})
target_link_libraries(tutorial2 ${KDE4_KDEUI_LIBS} phonon)
install(TARGETS tutorial2  ${INSTALL_TARGETS_DEFAULT_ARGS})

tutorial2.cpp

#include <phonon/mediaobject.h>
#include <phonon/audiooutput.h>

#include <QtGui/QApplication>
#include <QtGui/QMainWindow>
#include <QUrl>

class MainWindow : public QMainWindow
{
    Q_OBJECT
    public:
        MainWindow();
};

MainWindow::MainWindow()
{
    Phonon::MediaObject* media = new Phonon::MediaObject(this);
    createPath(media, new Phonon::AudioOutput(Phonon::MusicCategory, this));
    media->setCurrentSource(QUrl("/tmp/example.wav"));
    media->play();
}

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    QApplication app(argc, argv);
    QApplication::setApplicationName("Phonon Tutorial 2");
    MainWindow mw;
    mw.show();
    return app.exec();
}

#include "tutorial2.moc"

Compile and run it

cmake . && make && ./tutorial2

Getting more help

To talk among phonon experts, point your irc client to the server irc.freenode.org, channel #phonon.

See also

• Development/Tutorials/Phonon/Introduction/Python - same example in Python