KMediaPlayer expansion/standardisation

[Will Stephenson]

Hi

I think it would be a good idea to standardise media player's dcop interfaces 
by expanding the KMediaPlayer interface in kdelibs already used by a few 
players.  As I've said before[1], it would enable a lot of duplicate code to 
be removed at least.  I've done a comparison of various music and multimedia 
players' different interfaces (in technicolor!) here:

http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/william.stephenson/home.informal/player_dcop_comparison.pdf

As you can see:
KMediaPlayer currently provides functions I'd describe as: 
Media management
App capabilities
App state control
App state info

The other apps bring to the table a disjoint set of extensions to:
Media management
App state control
Media info
Volume controls

I'd like to unify the following sets of functions into KMediaPlayer
Media management
Media info
App capabilities
App state control
App state info

which could be used by music, multimedia, and even picture viewers.

and put the 'Volume controls' into a new generic interface KAudioControl, that 
can be used by audio capable players for fine grained control (boost the 
volume of the focused app) and mixers for coarse control.

Existing apps would be able to implement these interfaces for KDE 3.3 while 
maintaining their old interfaces (wrapped onto the new ones) for BC until KDE 
4, and extending/providing own interfaces for their app specific requirements 
(plugin management?).

What do you think of this idea?  As a next step I would produce a proposed 
function set for both new interfaces.

Will

[1] http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-multimedia&m=105732510824543&w=2