[Bug 48620] Kde has no unified media player / adopt mplayer for KDE

[Charles Samuels]

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>  Kde has: kaboodle, noatun, kscd, and aKtion
- -Kaboodle and Noatun are two UIs to the same "unified media player" arch.
- -Kscd isn't part of it because there's no (or very little) reasonably portable 
and reliable way to implement it.
- - Nobody uses aKtion anymore, it'll prolly go out of kde in 3.2

> And for misc. tasks it has: KMid, MMidi and KMix 
- - KMid/KMidi havn't been ported to the arch because nobody ported it to the 
arch.  We accept contributions
- - KMix is fine as it is, I've not seen anyone complain about it.  Where else 
would it belong anyway?
 
> The problem with this is that it forces the user to decide which application
> is appropriate for what they want to do. This is a problem because they 

You wanna play an MPEG?  Try Noatun (or Kaboodle, whichever UI suits you).  
Wanna play a Quicktime video?  Try Noatun or Kaboodle.  What about a Vorbis 
or mp3 file?  Try Noatun or Kaboodle!

Noatun and Kaboodle are two UIs to the exact same back end.

> often overlap in terms of there functionality (IE: File Types) but not in 
terms of their purpose as perceived by the user. For example both the 
built-in player in Konqueror and Noatun can play mp3s. But one is preserved 
as being quick and easy, where as the other is more advanced, with 
play-lists, skins, etc. This would be fine if all the user had to do was 
decide weather he just wants to 'preview' the file or open it, and indicate 
this somehow. But this is not the case. If the user wants to open a mp3, they 
right-click goto open with ... and are presented with a list of: Kaboodle, 
Noatun, Embedded Media Player, Netscape Plugin Viewer, and fairly likely 
Xmms. 
 
So they could just click on the file and get the default player.

> I think that Konqueror as the universal viewer is one of the greatest 
incremental advancements in computer usability ever. I think this should be 
extended to multimedia as well. This would eliminate the need for the user to 
learn multiple programs or different controls. Having a good Kde media player 
would also eliminate one of the major problems users have, which is 
artswrapper not working will, or causing a delay with, other audio/video 
players. 

Try noatun/Kaboodle with Xine


> Bug reports like 26233 and 25176 are symptoms of a much larger problem. That 
Kde (and just about anything else) lacks the multimedia infrastructure and 

Try noatun/Kaboodle with Xine.  Which is default in KDE 3.1.

> modularization to be able to support just about any new format as soon as 
the libraries are written. However this 'infrastructure' does exist, and is 
free software too. If you look at MPlayer, they support just about any type 
of Video and any type of Audio you can Imagine and it has a wide variety of 
video output drivers. However at this point it is essentially just an 

Kaboodle and Noatun do too with Xine.  This works in KDE 3.1.

The fact is that all you asked for is already in KDE 3.1.

Enjoy it.
 
 
- -- 
Charles Samuels <charles at kde.org>
"What would you do with a brain if you had one?" -- Dorothy (to the Scarecrow)
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