[Kdenlive-devel] Inpoints/outpoints, problem I need to tackle.

[Jason Wood]

Hmmm....

I've got a little problem that needs to be solved in order to get 
inpoints/outpoints working correctly.

One of the ways in which I want to be able to add clips to the timeline is as 
follows :

1. You select a clip so that it appears in the clip monitor.
2. You set the in and out points for the clip you want.
3. You drag the clip from the clip monitor to the timeline, where it is 
automatically set up to start/end in the correct places.

It's this last step that's tricky :-)

The problem stems from the fact that kdenlive does not receive mouse and 
keyboard clicks that occur on the area of the screen owned by piave. I have a 
few thoughts on how to solve this :

Idea 1 : Make the piave window ignore keyboard/mouse events and pass them 
directly on to whatever window it is embedded in (i.e., let X take the strain 
of getting the events to the right place).

* advantages - feels like the 'right' solution - no extra work would be needed 
to make it work in kdenlive, piave rightfully ignores all mouse/keypresses, 
and potentially it is very little work to do this in piave.
* disadvantages - I have absolutely no idea if it is possible :-( I need to 
explore the X windows specs to find out how, and I'm not sure how low level 
it is necessary to get - potentially it could lead into all sorts of 
unpleasant hacks to get around libSDL or whatever other toolkit is in use.

Idea 2 : Piave responds to keyboard/mouse events and uses VEML to communicate 
them to kdenlive.
* Advantages - Will most definitely work.
* Disadvantages - Feels like a horrible misuse of VEML - mouse movements may  
generate a lot of traffic, and when it reaches Kdenlive, the events need to 
be pulled out of the VEML handling and processed as if they were local mouse 
events. Local mouse events will still need to be handled in anticipation of 
those times when piave does not run as an embedded panel (an example would be 
if piave was running full screen on a second monitor, for instance)

Idea 3 : Have a separate 'drag' box on each monitor that can be used to drag 
clips to the monitor.
* advantages - Definitely works, quick to implement.
* disadvantages - Not a good solution for a UI point of view - the user will 
want to be able to click on the clip image to drag it, not on some little 
drag icon the side of it.

What do you think?  My plan is to research the X windows idea and see where it 
takes me. If anyone knows anything that might help me in my quest then please 
tell me :-)

Cheers,
Jason

-- 
Jason Wood
Homepage : www.uchian.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk