Playlists on Media Devices

[Bart Cerneels]

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 1:42 AM, Alejandro Wainzinger
<aikawarazuni at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ipods and other devices have playlists.  I can't think of a decent way
> to show them.  Can't really put them in the playlists tab, since it's
> a bit non-obvious for the user.  Should I somehow create a new
> category for the TreeView to deal with this, that is listed above all
> the artists, similar to the way the MediaBrowser did it in A1?  That
> sounds a bit hard to do, and I'm not sure if it's the best way to go
> about it.

Hi Alejandro,

Putting those playlists in the PlaylistBrowser's Playlist tab is
exactly what you should do. This is how I designed it: a MediaDevice
should have a PlaylistProvider for each PlaylistCategoryType it
offers. For iPod this would be UserPlaylist and PodcastChannel AFAIK.
All UserPlaylist types will end up in the Playlist tab (should be
called something similar to "My Playlist" but less Microsofty) thanks
to PlaylistManager magic.

The solution for the mixing of Playlists from different
PlaylistProviders is not clear to me yet. A treeview is possible but I
don't prefer it. Something like the category listview in dolphin is
what I was hopeing for we could use. Individual PlaylistProviders can
be hidden (or rather it's playlists) with a toggle button.

I've explained this concept before and wanted to implement is myself
but for obvious reasons I'm to busy ATM. So I'm hoping to convince
someone else that can take the first step in this implementation. It
would require some changes to the PlaylistManager, the
UserPlaylistCategory (in the PlaylistBrowser) and possibly changing
the QToolBox of the PlaylistBrowser to something less "wasteful" WRT
screenspace.

This idea has not been adapted to the patch Maximilian Kossick send to
the mailing list a few weeks ago although I don't think it changes
much of the concepts.

Bart