Thanks for all the interesting comments, but it looks as if no one knows the answer?
You might think that was a question. It wasn’t.
Nonetheless, a few possible alternatives have been offered that might have been worth investigating, including VLC – which apparently still does what you desire it to.
Failing that, I can only suggest directing this to KDE themselves; I’d probably start with KDE Discuss rather than the Bug tracker – KDE devs tend to participate frequently.
It was a half-question to prompt a further response, hopefully with a solution. I am aware of the alternatives but wanted a specific solution to the Parole/Gstreamer problem that did NOT include the resource-intensive VLC.
Thanks for the pointer but Parole is actually an Xfce program.
Parole is actually quite standalone; as are many Linux applications; in this case, yes, Parole is one of the default applications distributed with XFCE – I had mistakenly thought it to be under the KDE umbrella, as so many are.
The premise remains, substituting KDE in my previous post to XFCE:
Regards.
Moderator edit: Typo correction. My secretary will send you the invoice.
Thank you. 