Fwd: I want Amarok for video!

[Andreas Baier]

Hello,

> I'm not sure I like the way things are heading though. I don't see why
> Amarok needs to be a universal media player. In fact, I think Amarok is
> bordering on becoming a little too heavy.
I disagree with this opinion, but I guess I know its reason. It's the fear to 
get a windows media player on KDE.
But I think this cannot happen, because all universial media players I know 
made one big mistake. They first added support for all media and then added a 
possibility to organize the media through playlists. The result often was not 
convincing.
Amarok was developped in a different way. First there was a playlist (and a 
collection) then there was added support for more media through its different 
sound engines. I think, the result is better, why amarok IS the best 
audioplayer I know=)
itunes now shows that the combination of music and video work but I also think 
that the integration of video is not very nice.
> I do agree that there should be an application that can index video files.
> It would be really useful with tags for videos, similar to the ID tags that
> music tracks have. And I've always thought that video files should have an
> internal index of what different time intervals contain. That way, the
> location bar in a video player could be completely redefined, and one could
> automatically skip credits or intros in tv shows for example.
>
> BUT that is NOT a job for Amarok. Video indexing and all that stuff should
> be done by a separate, dedicated application. I want Amarok for music. I
> want it to be as fast, light, and easy to manage as possible. Music and
> video are two completely different media.
Instead I really love amarok, i think it's not really fast, particularly for 
big collections, but it became faster with time and as far as I know it will 
also benefit from qt 4, so it should become really fast.
The new abstraction of media support of KDE 4 should also make it easier to 
integrate video support and without making it slower.

I also disagree to the statement these are completly two different media.
From the intuitive side, there are many aspects which both media share. Both 
need a play button =), a slider, next and previous could be used for jumping 
forward and back. So there are only few changes to the interface.
AND Amarok already made a big step to the must-have of video support: 
podcasts.
I don't know if there's another application for podcasts under KDE, but as far 
as I know there's only amarok.
Many of my podcasts are videos and now I use amarok for fetching them but I 
have to go to the download directory for viewing them (the right click menu 
("open with") is not very comfortable for many videos, yet).

The integration could be really nice. Amarok could have another bar on the 
right side like this really nice vertical  bar on the left. There you could 
jump between the played video and the playlist (and perhaps between the a 
visualisation mode, an advanced tag-editor and ripper and more=), ... ).

Another reason why amarok should have video support is, because we don't know 
how music is delivered in future. The offers are becoming greater, and 
perhaps soon many songs will be delivered with video-clips (as DVD-Audio 
does).
It should be great especially for a party mode. So amarok could jump between a 
fullscreen interface (like kirocker, which really is great) and a videoclip 
in the playlist.

greetings Andreas