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

[Helio Chissini de Castro]

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On Sunday 16 March 2003 08:15, Carsten Pfeiffer wrote:
> On Sunday 16 March 2003 11:57, Stefan Gehn wrote:
> > 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
>
> Using noatun/kaboodle to play audiocds works just fine. Just try it out,
> select an audiocd:/ track in either player. Note that kio_audiocd will only
> be used in the filedialog, not for playing (mpeglib does that).

( i'm forwarding this discussion to kde-devel, because i'm think it's relevant 
)

Guys, i'ts my 2c of personal opinion, and hope thist star a good flamewar 
now..

Ok, ok, we CAN use audiocd to play with noatun/kaboodle, and gues what, 
works.. But kscd has one thing ( blame me, i'm old.. :-) that no one other 
kde multimedia application has befora i saw "juk". Simplicity.
They have almost the right interface, they work very well to read cdtext and 
cddb, and looks like the standrd cd payer as introduced to us in hardware 
version long time ago.. They don't do need anymore. ( please, let's maintain 
discussion in higher level, forgetting code at a moment )
Noatun suffers from a good playlist. Ok it has "dub" playlist, ok it has the 
standard playlist, but all are far from ass good and simple as "juk". In 
other way, "juk" is what i want to see as a playlist in noatun ( not blame me 
again :-).
What we have at this moment is a hell of fantastic application called noatun, 
that really can play everything, but suffers from a better interface ( yes, 
it's just this, we really don't need to bother reinvent all ). 
Someone can arg that i can choose all plugin i want to show my noatuna like i 
want. True, and very deeply wrong..
Thats almost one thing that turn noatun hard to use. Many options. It's the 
same problema that ever windows user starts to complain when saw the "new" 
Media PLayer interface and miss their old basic square buttons player. Ok, 
ok, again you can change the view to old.. And now every major multimedia app 
in Linux/Windows/Mac world has the same crappy thing to change all apperance 
everytime to every form we want. Blame the, blame us.. It's a crappy thing 
too. Users usually don't play with their configs everytime. In case of a 
house with a family, usually has just one computer, that the smart kid 
in'da'house play, and their parents just sit to write some and click in one 
button to see a player ( like their hardware cd/dvd player 0 because they 
want to HEAR SONGS, or maybe SEE VIDEOS, not change the explosion animation 
sync with the song, with for us computer addicts it's nice, but doesn't 
reflect anything to him when they typing a text in the computer, just wan't 
LISTEN a song. If you pay attentions in Winamp users and ask why they choose 
this player ( they are good indeed, but at time, many good player exists in 
Windows world, some better a lot of winamp ), it's they simplicity. Three 
square form factors, a playlist almos good, a equalizer basic, simple and 
like real consumer world, and a player, with the basic buttons ( ok, ok, 
again, in 3.x version they follow the new "guides" and blow up evrything to 
crapp like others app ) a lcd showing the time and a tag showing me the song 
or movie name, remembering that you can double click in tag and see info, and 
maybe edit then ( juk does better in that mode ).. Question ? I need more for 
a player ? If you say yes, you don't need a player, you need other 
applycation.
Now, after moving a bit away from subject, let's joining what we have in 
kdemultimedia:

* noatun: For me, is almost THE media player. The visible problems are ( 
visible, forget the code )
- - Almost the right interface. Default interface is simple, could be a little 
small and maybe with itens rearrange. I believe with simple changes, they are 
the basic what user will use, because they pushh the button and forget that 
behind some other window, or leave the computer to do other thing while play 
music.
- - Don't play CD's  and read cdtext/cddb as easy as mus't do. We had a customer 
that need this feature to deploy integrated systems and they aren't pleased 
with two or three applications in current solution. If have a detection 
system that noatun just add cd in the playlist, will be the heaven that we 
miss now. Today, kscd does it wonderfully.
- - Playlist is inconsistent. we don't have the perfect playlist just because we 
give many options to developers.. On the current days, the real heel of a 
good thing introduced in the playlist way of life is the multiple playlists, 
as juk have, as winamp 3 have, as many others. They dafault playlist of 
noatun could be replaced by juk interface, or the better one, juk wonderfull 
things could be "attached" to noatun.. Simple, efficient ( and HAVE A REAL 
random mode )
- - Video playing need some polishing.. Xine lib it's a good lib, but lacks of 
easy config and codec config too. Since noatun is the integrated video 
player, they must have an easy way to configure, or at least xplain how to 
configure the things to play video as user wan't, just clicking button. I see 
fastly kmplayer becoming the video player on linux, and not because they are 
ease to config, far from that, just because it's more simple to start and 
play any video with him if they are right compiled.. I confess that i'm 
scared when i open the base xine-ui config and saw all this things.

* juk: Great, great, great application, or playlist ?
- - Before all. Don't start the juk duplication discussion again, maybe a miss 
some of thread that i didn;t read every mail..
- - juk does exactly what they mention do, so now ? They start to incorporate 
other things..
juk HAS the potential to bring users to then, and not because they are a good 
player, but because they are a good PLAYLIST. Ease to manage, with 
informations that we can see. When a great number of common user ( not us, 
the hackers/hardcore users ) start to use juk, we fastly will see our 
bugzilla filling up with requests like "juk cannot play my video bla.avi", 
"juk not see my streaming.. ", "juk is great man, lovely, can it play my 
soccer game stream ? ". So? Let's recode again more interfaces and duplicate 
everything ?

* kscd: For me, in my 20 years of computer using, is the CD player. has 
everything the good of old initial windows cd player, and the new "modern" 
things introduced before. But it's time to leave space to integrate their 
behaviour in noatun ( or the next big kde player )..

* kaboodle: I don't need mention kaboodle because the i consider him the 
siamese browser brother from noatun, so what they just need is bettering the 
browser integration, and using the rest of resources from brother.. And 
nothing more, to not create more dificulty.

* Kmidi: MIDI support in Linux still is precary.. Seriously, timidity is good, 
but is far from what we desire to play MIDI usually. But it's a minor issue, 
since now SMF is more relegated to a web page addon that a serious use..

WHAT WE NEED ? ( tm )
Stop to fighting.. Every time, every new application that is submitted, we 
fight one aginst other the relevancy, why this app exists in the world :-), 
bla bla bla..
I know that coders are so proud of your code, and more, they hardly admit any 
issue with your code/app unless they have some pressure. It's apply to me 
sometime too.
We need try to fix our differences, gain some maturity, and buit the BIG ONE. 
And just this.. Sounds simple ?
But IS real simple. 
Why not do an effort to help "juk" be the playlist of noatun ? My apologies to 
"split" ( Charles ) and "dub" ( Eray ) playlists, but they can help to do 
this job, why not ? And about the juk developers, i believe they see some 
issues to do in noatun to recreate juk as playlist, so let's help noatun core 
man's :-)
Why not apply a simple timidity backend to play MIDI ( kmidi just do that with 
some others really unusable things )

Jus't to finish,
Ok, ok, i'm not the best coder, i help to little on KDE on recent days, i know 
that do this simple thing will require a lot of code and personal 
relationship effort, bue KDE is always this for mostly of us, and this easy 
turn KDE better and better everytime, as coders act like at least a bunch of 
rela friends. So it's time to stop ou diferences a little and thinking about 
new direction to turn KUMP a reality ( nice name, ahn ? ) Kde Unified Media 
Player.

BTW.. kdenetwork have lot's of fight, but now we have 
kmail+korganizer+kaddressbook integrated. They managed hte issues and did the 
job. Why not here ?

- -- 
Helio Castro
KDE Developer
Development Conectiva S.A.
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