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

[Stefan Gehn]

Moin,

On Samstag März 15 2003 18:56, Neil Stevens wrote:
>
> http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48620
>

To make some use out of this bug I'll comment a bit on it in here (I don't 
think this should all go into bugs.kde.org).

> Kde has: kaboodle, noatun, kscd, and aKtion 
we could immediately remove kscd (or move it to somewhere else) if we had a 
way to use audiocd ioslave for realtime ripping of wav/mp3/ogg data that gets 
fed to arts WITHOUT creating a stupid temp file that does not get deleted 
afterwards (that's how it works now and overall it does not even play fine, 
my xp2000 cannot handle all the en-/decoding at once or it's my sucky 
ide-system, whatever).

IMO aKtion should have been kicked out long time ago, I see no use for it. 
Both kaboodle and noatun can play mpeg and avi and that's what everybody 
wants today. If anybody objects with that then please enlighten me about 
aKtion as I have no idea what it actually can play (once looked ad it in kde2 
and found it out to be useless for me) :))

> And for misc. tasks it has: KMid, MMidi and KMix 

No idea about MIDI and I have no idea where kmix should be integrated into, I 
like kmix as is, especially the applet and I cannot really see usability 
problems with kmix either. :)

> 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. 

Ok, I hope get what the user wants here:

- Use a sane default on doubleclick, for me this would be
 o (double-)click previes in kaboodle (embedded in konq)
 o ctrl (double-)click enqueues in noatun (action dependant on noatun setting, 
it could also kill the playlist if you want it like that)

- have less choice as it confuses him (yes, you read right although this is a 
bit against the philosophy unix once had)

I have no idea what nutscrape plugin viewer has to do in there, nor do I know 
what Embedded Media Lamer is compared to kaboodle :)

For the xmms part I think we should make clear for distros that they don't 
have to install xmms by default as noatun+kaboodle are the kde-dreamteam :)=
This sounds like hiding away xmms but I see no other way of making the choice 
smaller for an end-user.

> 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

Again, this sounds like he wants kaboodle embedded in konq ;)

> 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

And if you look at its default-gui or its api you will clearly see that this 
project sucks a lot (I have to admit I use it as well but I don't feel like 
playing everything using mplayer) :P
This user might not have enough knowledge about mplayer so we should tell him 
about the pros/cons of the project. Given the fact that kmplayer does not 
work properly here (hangs on playing embedded movies with sound, works for 
files without sound) I think mplayer is the wrong infrastructure to use for 
KDE. Also its developers are even more insane than the noatun-folks (nobody 
shall get angry now, I'm coding on noatun as well *g*) ;)

> So ideally it would include all of the video library so as not to have
> massive dependencies.
We should reply that distros have packages and that packages have dependencies 
so on installing kde everything should get installed at one click, if it does 
not work then it's the distros to blame.

For the rest I have no idea, maybe somebody else comes up with some usable 
(and doable!) idea about integrating video/audio encoding into kde :)

Bye, Stefan aka mETz
-- 
sgehn_AT_gmx.net | ICQ#51123152 | Moege der Pinguin mit euch sein