[GSoC status report] Week 1

[Téo Mrnjavac]

Hello Nikolaj and team, here's the first issue of my weekly GSoC status report.
This first week started off with a lengthy discussion about possible
transcoding solutions.
We evaluated many possibilities on IRC, including a KIO slave for
transcoding, but after talking to many of you, as well as dfaure I
came to the following conclusions:
1) transcoding is an action, not a location, so it doesn't translate
very naturally to a KIO slave
2) even if I made the transcoding KIO slave somehow like the Audio CD
KIO slave, the imaginary transcoded tracks should be visualized
somewhere, and none of the solutions really make file management any
easier - the user experience ends up with a net loss when compared to
a simple service menu for Konqueror.
3) transcoding could also be an argument in existing URLs, e.g.
file:///path/to/file.ogg?transcode=mp3 but this doesn't offer many
benefits for the end user, who can't be expected to write URLs.
For these reasons, I have decided to implement the feature as a KJob.
I already have a prototype, TranscodeJob, which wraps around ffmpeg
through KProcess, but obviously if need arises it can use pretty much
anything. Currently it can transcode a file with a hardcoded codec
setting into the same directory and not much more, but at least it's a
proof of concept. For the past few days I have been working on
TranscodeFormat, a lightweight class that aggregates encoding
parameters, does sanity checks on them and generates a ffmpeg argument
string.

Next week I plan to keep working on TranscodeFormat to give it a more
usable interface, and of course on TranscodeJob, so that it emits
progress signals. Other stuff on my short term TODO list include:
transcoding of multiple files, showing progress info and basic GUI
work so I can finally test the options I'm adding to TranscodeFormat.

Cheers
Teo