Phonon::VideoWidget embedded inside a QGraphicsProxyWidget

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On March 26, 2010, Christophe Olinger wrote:
> This is not 100 % true. At the moment Shantanu and me try to have it
> also scale down to netbook size screens. This will be a bigger user
> base in the future than big tv screens IMHO. Also that is my

i should have been more specific. by "large screens" i meant things larger 
than the n900 or the Jax10's we had at tokamak 4.

i think a primary use case for PMC will be laptops, with T.V.s being a 
secodary one.

as Zack points out, more important than screen size, however, is the input 
device. on pocketable devices, that is your finger (or, at worst, a stylus). 
on laptops, that's a keyboard and mouse. on a T.V. it's a hand-held remote 
control.

i don't think we can sanely target both pocketable devices and laptops/T.V.s 
due to this. i do think we can target both laptops and T.V.s, however. the 
reason for this is that while the T.V. is limited by a remote control input, 
on the laptop use case when one fires up a full screen mediacenter (which is 
what PMC should be) you want to go into a simplified user experience that is 
centered around media viewing.

if you want something richer, that doesn't take over the whole display and 
with more point-and-click finesse, that's what apps like kaffeine and amarok 
are for.

this means that PMC only needs to address the same audiences that plasma-
desktop or plasma-netbook would, and should be aiming for a UI that is clear 
enough that even a remote control is good enough.

to go down this path a little bit more, even, here are some typical use cases 
i have in mind for PMC based on observation of today's typical computer user:

* Joe is on a train / airplane travelling between two cities. The trip is long 
enough to watch the latest episode of his favourite T.V. show which he 
downloaded the night before from his PVR at home. Joe pops open his laptop, 
clicks on the Desktop Toolbox and selects "Media Center". PMC loads and he 
selects "Video", which presents a list of videos on his internal hard drive.

* Jane is at home and wants to show her dinner guests pictures from the recent 
weekend trip she went on. Jane plugs her laptop into the living room 
television, opens the application launcher (Kickoff, Lancelot) and selects 
"Media Center". PMC starts up and she selects "Photos" which shows various 
sets of photo albums. After going through the "Weekend Ski Trip" photos, she 
goes back and selects Videos -> Youtube and loads a Youtube playlist of top 40 
music videos to play in the background while they visit.

* Jaqueline sits down on the couch with her husband Jack and they turn on the 
television and their Plasma Media Center set top box. They grab the remote 
control and check the videos that they had recorded / downloaded but haven't 
watched yet. They select an episode of House and another of Fawlty Towers and 
press "Play".

now, these are the use cases i have in my mind. they may be different from 
those working on PMC have. hopefully not, but it's certainly possible. :) we 
should therefore get to documenting what's being done here. i've gone ahead 
and started a page here:

	http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Plasma/Plasma_Media_Center

feel free to change any and all content and add, add, add more to it.

the use cases above do provide some interesting insights, though: it would be 
sensible to have a Digikam photo provider for PMC so that one can create their 
photo albums in Digikam and then later view those same albums in PMC. it would 
be sensible to have some notion of what's been watched and be able to set up 
simple "playlists" by selecting mutiple items from a list of available media. 
it doesn't matter if PMC works on the N900 well.

thoughts?

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
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KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks