KDEREVIEW: nowplaying dataengine and applet for plasma

[Ian Monroe]

On Jan 25, 2008 5:10 PM, Alex Merry <huntedhacker at tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
> At Friday 25 January 2008 10:51 pm, you wrote:
> > I can't imagine we still need to have separate implementation for all
> > player...
> >
> > If there is not yet standard multimedia dbus interface for doing this in fd.o,
> > we probably should make it one now.
>
> There is: MPRIS.  Which this dataengine supports.  The design is a little daft (three different objects with different methods, but the same interface name).  But it's there.  Still, only one player actually uses it (Audacious).  There are rumours Amarok 2 will support it.  VLC 0.9.0 should support it.
>
> These should all work instantly with this applet, providing they follow the spec (Audacious deviates slightly in some areas).
>
> Interestingly, there's a KMediaPlayer dbus interface in kdelibs which, as far as know, no players support (certainly Juk doesn't).
>
> Alex

Dragon Player also implements MPRIS, even the parts that don't really apply.

I find MPRIS to be a fine standard, it has the methods it needs to get
the job done. I'm hardly a DBus expert, where I've heard most of the
criticism coming from it seems. So for the folks criticizing it, just
join the MPRIS mailing list[*] and voice your concerns and suggestion.
Because in about 6 months to a year (with releases from Amarok,
VideoLAN and others), it is going to be the defacto standard.

As far as kdemultimedia vs. extragear: if you plan on releasing with
every KDE release, I think you should just join kdemultimedia. The
best reason to be in extragear is because you want to set your own
release schedule. Several projects in extragear are releasing with KDE
now, this only makes sense if they don't fit well with any of the
other packages. Not really the case for a nowplaying app.

Ian

*http://mailman.videolan.org/listinfo/mpris (very low traffic)