[dot] First Day KDE 4 Multimedia Meeting

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1148680949/

From: Jos Poortvliet (superstoned) <jos at mijnkamer.nl>
Dept: mmm
Date: Friday26/May/2006, @15:02

First Day KDE 4 Multimedia Meeting
==================================

   In the rainy Netherlands, eighteen KDE hackers have been working in
the Annahoeve [http://www.wallsteijn.nl] on Multimedia for the fourth
incarnation of KDE. This report outlines the meeting topics, and the
results of interesting presentations and explains how KDE developers
outbid each others marshmallow records.
  This is where Phonon and amaroK 2 meet
[http://static.kdenews.org/danimo/k3m_day1.jpg]
     The meeting officially started at noon, but the organization and
Matthias, Martin, Alexandre, Florian and Gábor were already at the
Annahoeve at 9:30. We had things up and running rather quickly and some
smalltalk went on. Marshmallows were put on the table and Adriaan told
everybody they could earn a marshmallow if they were able to stick 10
pieces into their mouth. Sebastian got close.

     The afternoon started with a brief keynote, followed by
presentations about Phonon and amaroK. Matthias Kretz talked about the
basic design goals of Phonon (see his slides)
[http://static.kdenews.org/danimo/k3m-vir.pdf]. It should provide the
multimedia support that 80% of the applications need in a simple way;
the other 20% are simply not its focus. For example, if an application
needs precise control at sample level, it is better off talking to a
media framework directly. Generally speaking, most applications just
need some basic things like playing or streaming video and audio.
Matthias further explained how effects worked, and what to consider when
building a back-end, and demonstrated some some code examples.

     Max Howell talked about moving to amaroK 2 and the Windows port
that will come with that. The amaroK hackers are really excited about
amaroK 2 and they really want to move on and work on it. A core redesign
is needed to prevent regressions from coming up in new releases. This
weekend will be used to plan large parts of this redesign.

     Max also pointed out some issues with packaging, mostly due to
packagers making weird choices when building amaroK packages like
depending on MySQL. These things should be solved by making packaging
amaroK easier and by more communication with the packagers.

     Other topics were Last.fm [http://last.fm] and Audioscrobbler
integration. Last.fm offers more services that amaroK doesn't yet make
use of, it can be used to give and share arbitrary labels and other
information about songs - the amaroK developers want to add support for
this. Last.fm also offers personal radio streams, with for example your
favorite music, or music listened to by people with a similar taste.
Integration in amaroK will allow you to skip songs in the stream, and
Last.fm even learns from that.

     Usability has always been an important focus in amaroK, but it's
hard to get consensus about certain issues. Still the plan is to do some
serious work for amaroK 2 with the help of the two usability experts
available at the multimedia meeting. Being able to meet face to face
makes usability discussions much easier - as you're less likely to step
on someone's toe if you can see them...

     After a great dinner, the hacking continued. Lively discussions and
silently hacking were intermingled, and the resulting code was
committed.

     All in all, we came to an important conclusion: The important thing
in Free Software is not the free beer; it is the Free bar which ensures
the beer will STAY free.