Standard DCOP interface for KDE Media Players

[Will Stephenson]

Hi

I'm the author of a Kopete plugin called Now Listening.  Its job is to report  
to your IM buddies what you're listening to.  Currently, I talk to XMMS, 
Noatun and KsCD, and for each new player, I have to implement a new class to 
interface the player's own (DCOP) interface with my plugin.  The DCOP 
interfaces, that each player exposes, are by and large very similar (see 
below).

Other applications have had to follow a similar approach - the kicker applet 
MediaControl, in kdeaddons, talks to Noatun, XMMS and JuK in the same way, 
and I believe the Karamba and Slicker groups may have similar applets.  There 
are other possible 'glue' apps, such as generic on screen display or text to 
speech of media information, central control apps that mute or pause media 
players when receiving a videophone call, or media choice driven automatic 
playlist generators.

I've considered combining the interface I use with that of MediaControl to 
form a mini 'media player interface library' but the tight coupling this 
would introduce between different cvs components (if in kdemultimedia, apps 
using it would require it to be installed, if in kdelibs... yuck) is not 
attractive.

To ease the lives of media player parasites such as myself, and media player 
authors like you, I suggest that a standard DCOP interface for KDE media 
players is needed.  We could define a standard set of operations and their 
semantics that would be implemented by all music / video / radio players.  It 
would also allow connection to brand new, previously unseen kde media players 
by checking for this interface.

Please let me know if you think this suggestion would be useful and I'll post 
my first draft of a set of operations.  I'm willing to rewrite the DCOP 
interfaces of individual apps (I've got a modified KsCD that has a playing() 
method here) but it's not worth doing alone, if there isn't consensus that 
this is a good idea.

(Please cc: me on replies)

Will
-- 
Will Stephenson
IRC: Bille