GSoC proposal: Enhanced Amarok UI

[Leonardo Franchi]

On Thursday 02 April 2009 14:49:14 Enrico Ros wrote:
> On Thursday 02 April 2009 12:38:59 Leonardo Franchi wrote:
> > On Wednesday 01 April 2009 18:38:46 Enrico Ros wrote:
> > > Thanks for the feedback Leo, it's really valuable!
> > >
> > the part that personally i'm least comfortable with is turning the whole
> > window into an opengl-accelerated viewport. first of all, i don't even
> > know why we want to turn amarok into a pure opengl app, but thats besides
> > the point. i've played around with the few opengl plasma applets, and
> > they tend to hog up a good % of my CPU (and i have a nvidia 8600gt and
> > intel 2.5ghz cpu)... so it would be anything but light. and then, what
> > about users who don't have fancy graphics cards or cpus? also, if the
> > whole app is a QGV, we're still obviously going to use standard widgets
> > for a lot of it, and so then we enter the quagmire of the
> > QGraphicsProxyWidgets, and while they are mostly good as a hack, I really
> > can't imagine using them to embed *all* of amarok. they still have issues
> > with mouse events, popup widgets, etc.
>
> Here I must ask you to trust the research nature of this proposal. Of
> course it can end in bad, unaccepted code, but I already worked on projects
> where the OpenGL viewport really made the difference (like interacting with
> 9 video streams in an opengl viewport at 50fps with less than 60% single
> cpu load). OpenGL is good for:
>  - fast blitting
>  - texture scaling
> The Qt OpenGL painter is good for some things, bad for others, and it's
> still improving. Trying to minimize the "bad" (like 'circles' or 'paths')
> will allow to acheive a good performace. If you played with the OpenGL
> plasma applet.. well, that renders with OpenGL to a video buffer, then
> unpacks the buffer to the system memory where the software QPainter used by
> plasma will blend (!) the rendered texture in the plasma canvas... the
> result: blending the whole area at $FPS. Will be slow even if *nothing*
> changes in the actual applet contents. By the way, OpenGL support will be
> off by default. I still prefer software rendering (unless OpenGL halves the
> cpu usage).

basically, you've convinced me :) thinking of this as a research project is a 
really good way to do it I think, and agree that there are some really amazing 
potentialities that you want to investigate. also, i realize you know way more 
about opengl than I do, so i mostly trust you when you say it can be done 
fast. 

anyway, the proposal has my full support. glad we could discuss it :)

> This summer the closest thing to a job is my girlfriend ;-) It's a pity
> that universities in italy officially stop at the end of june and start
> back in the end of september.. a little misaligned with the summer of code
> but I'll try to compensate that.

Great! just be clear about your school commitments (like exams) in the 
proposal---they aren't usually a problem, but it's nice to be able to know 
them and plan around them with your mentor early on so that there are no 
surprises.

thats pretty much it---last thing is make sure to update the proposal on 
melange (soc webapp) as that's what all the mentors will be looking at. if you 
incorporate the results of all the discussion it'll be a much better proposal.

cheers,
leo
-- 
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lfranchi at kde.org		Tufts  University 2010
leonardo.franchi at tufts.edu                The KDE Project