[dot] Second Day Multimedia Meeting

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1148805012/

From: jos poortvliet (superstoned) <jos at mijnkamer.nl>
Dept: mmmm
Date: Sunday28/May/2006, @01:30

Second Day Multimedia Meeting
=============================

   Though it was still rainy here at the Annahoeve in the Netherlands,
the KDE multimedia meeting was definately up to speed. This article will
report on the progress the hackers made yesterday, including the "why"
and "what" of redesigning and speeding up amaroK, work on the KIO slaves
and Phonon.
  Happy peacocks: A few hours without rain
[http://static.kdenews.org/danimo/rejoicing_peacocks.jpg]
     We had a quick start in the morning, several people where already
busy hacking at 9. The morning was filled with hacking sessions and
small get-togethers, and a few hours after lunch, we held a round table
with everybody, asking what they had done so far.

     Christian Mülhäuser and Seb Ruiz have been working on optimization
of amaroK [http://amarok.kde.org] startup time. They gave the context
browser a speedup of aproximately 50% and the playlist browser now loads
40-60% faster. Meanwhile, Bart Cerneels was working on the Podcasts.
They sometimes have very long names, with a lot of redundancy. He tried
to build some code to shorten them, without having to throw away
information. And Martin Aumüller made it possible to drag'n'drop files
from any KDE application into amaroK. AmaroK then adds them to the
database, by putting them in a sensible location based on the tags in
the file.

     Matthias Kretz redesigned large parts of Phonon
[http://phonon.kde.org] completely today, after a talk with Thomas
Zander (of KOffice fame). He decided to start experimenting with a few
internals, which had to lead to a more flexible system. The currently
almost stable backend API won't be affected, tough. Talks with the
amaroK hackers also prompted him to enhance the communication between
applications and Phonon. Christian Esken, who came visit today, has been
working with us on Kmix. In cooperation with usability expert
[http://www.openusability.org] Florian Grässle and Matthias, they
decided on the implementation of several features. Solid integration
went in Kmix, so hotplugging will work in the future version of Kmix.
Florian also teamed up with Mark Kretschmann to enhance the usability of
the script control in amaroK, while our other usability expert, Dan
Leinir Jensen Turthra, worked with several other amaroK developers to
create the next-generation amaroK interface.
 Matthias improving Phonon
[http://static.kdenews.org/danimo/matthias_hacking.jpg]
     Allan Sandfield Jensen has been working on KIO file seeking (as
part of his Google Summer of Code
[http://developer.kde.org/summerofcode/soc2006.html] project), and his
announcement of a more-or-less working implementation was recieved by a
big applause from the other attending hackers. His work will bring the
network transparancy of KDE to a whole new level, allowing for easy
playing of music over a network or directly editing of movies and
pictures on a remote machine.

     Ian Monroe and Max Hmowell have been working on better error
messages for the users if there is no mp3 support in the distribution
they use. The distribution has to provide a script for amaroK so it can
offer the user to automatically install the nessecary codecs.
Cooperation has already been promised by Jonathan Riddell from Kubuntu.
 [http://www.kubunut.org]
     A few hours after lunch, the amaroK developers spent considerable
time whiteboarding and discussing the basic design of our favorite audio
player. This time they went really in-depth, and there was a heavy
discussion going on. Thomas has been working with the amaroK developers
today on several design and usability issues, and was also involved in
the whiteboarding of amaroK 2. An important goal was to design amaroK to
become smaller, and thus faster and easier to maintain. By improving
amaroK's design, they hope to make it easier to develop things like
extensive plugin support. But design-wise this is hard to do and there
are serious security-related issues. Aside from the basic design, things
like quality control, usability and the &#8220;target user&#8221; for
amaroK have been discussed.
 amaroK developers on the whiteboard
[http://static.kdenews.org/danimo/amarok_design.jpg]
     Meanwhile, the developers not involved with the discussion
generally used earphones to avoid the discussion and continued to hack
away, or talked in small groups. Gabor and Alexandre have been busy
porting amaroK to Qt 4, and they got close to getting it to compile.

     Slowly but steady, the discussion dis-integrated, and more beer
started to flow in. So, now the whiteboard had been filled enough,
dinner was served. After the excellent diner everybody went upstairs
again to continue their work or implement some of the stuff that has
been discussed.

     To wrap things up, this has been an extremely productive day, both
in terms of code, design and face-to-face interaction. So, it is past
midnight now, so time to get everybody to our hotel in Zundert - we have
to be at breakfeast at 8:15...

     Since we all love pictures. Sebastian Kügler has put up a gallary
of the meeting
[http://vizzzion.org/?id=gallery&gcat=KDE4MultimediaMeeting]. Thanks
Sebas!