Adding multimedia-related features to Baloo

[Denis Steckelmacher]

Hi,

Last summer, I worked on Nepomuk during the Google Summer of Code. Its 
successor, Baloo, is an infrastructure allowing programs and the user to 
add metadata to files and to look for them.

When I asked people if they had any idea of a project on which I could 
work this summer, many of them said that integrating Baloo and the 
multimedia applications would be a very good idea. I talked to the Baloo 
developers and they like the idea.

One question remains, though: what do you think that Baloo could bring 
the multimedia applications? Is there something related to semantic 
search that could prove useful to your applications?

Here is a list of ideas that I thought of:

* Writing Baloo metadata back into the files it comes from. If the user 
tags a MP3 file as being "nice", then this tag could also be written in 
the metadata of the file, in a format compatible with taglib. This would 
allow non-KDE applications (or applications that do not use Baloo) to 
still be able to see the tags (or any Baloo metadata) added by the user
* Adding support for Baloo to the multimedia applications, so that 
multimedia applications can see the Baloo metadata and can modify them.
* Baloo can already extract metadata from multimedia files (using taglib 
for instance). Some multimedia applications may want to rely on Baloo 
for metadata handling instead of using their own extractors.
* Online databases like IMDB can provide additional information about 
multimedia files. It could be interesting to add to Baloo the ability to 
use these online databases. Multimedia applications using Baloo could 
therefore use this new feature to get information about files without 
having to implement all the downloading and parsing themselves.

The goal is to provide as much functionality to as many multimedia 
applications without duplicating too much code. Being able to share 
information about different programs is also good (applications using 
taglib or other libraries of the same kind are already able to see what 
the others do, but Dolphin, for instance, is not yet able to write 
metadata anywhere else than in Baloo).

Denis Steckelmacher