Help wanted to evolve KDEs music players

[Martin Sandsmark]

On Mon, Aug 03, 2015 at 09:13:20AM +0200, kainz.a wrote:
> Jens from the VDG is in contact with the VLC dev's and they ask some times
> ago about an design proposal so in future it could be that VLC is
> influenced by the VDG.

This is good! But I think it makes sense for us in the KDE community to help
out a bit here as well. For us we gain a player with very good integration
with Plasma, they gain a really nice interface.

The VLC developers also have a lot of things on their plate, and I'm not sure
if a revamp of their UI is high on the priority list.

I can probably do it myself, but as I work fulltime, I don't really have that
much time I can dedicate to things like this. But the initial implementation
is what would take time, maintaining just the UI module even I should have
time to do. And if more people want to help out with the initial creation, we
could probably arrange a tiny sprint to kickstart it.


> In addition VLC is theme-able. I made an theme for smplayer and it looks
> realy nice in plasma (
> http://forum.smplayer.info/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=8050&p=14312#p14312). I like
> the posibility of different designs on different desktops and I'd like to
> work on an VLC breeze theme (vision) too. I't doesn't depend on the the
> outcome of this task.

That looks really nice!


> For me VLC is a great player and a lot of people knows him. The player is
> well maintained. The questions are how the collaboration would work on the
> code base. How deep the kde integration should be (baloo, plasma mobile).
> Licence issues, ...

Well, I'm fairly certain that the VLC people are pretty open for
contributions from KDE.

As for the various things we can do to integrate, I don't really see what we
would gain from integrating with baloo at all. If people actually have some
problem with VLC that would be solved with Baloo, though, we can probably
write a module to handle that (probably disabled by default, or just living
out of the tree even). For Plasma Mobile I don't see why they wouldn't use
VLC, especially if we make a kick-ass qml-based UI for it.

I don't see what licensing issues there would be, the core parts of VLC are
lgpl 2+, and the rest is gpl2+, pretty much the same as almost everything
else in KDE.

-- 
Martin Sandsmark