Plasma Media Center progress

[Christophe Olinger]

Dear plasma friends,

I wanted to give you a quick heads up on how far the plasma media center has
come in the recent weeks. I'll coordinate with the other contributors to
blog about it soonish.

On Startup:
You see only 3 buttons at the moment: local music, local pictures and local
videos. Clicking on any of these buttons switches the mediacenter to a
certain state. (Later you will have here you tube, flickr, picasa, ownCloud
:-)

Music Mode:
Here, you see a browser (grid or list view) only showing music, you have a
control bar with typical playback control buttons and seek/volume slider and
a playlist. The playlist also only shows music files. Clicking on a file in
the browser adds it to the playlist, clicking on a file in the playlist
starts to play the file. Browser, controlbar and playlist remain visible
while music is playing.

Video Mode
Same as above except that the browser and the playlist only show video
files. Clicking on a file in the browser again adds to the playlist,
clicking on the playlist starts the video file in fullscreen mode. The
controlbar and playlist automatically turn to an autohide mode but are
accessible via the screen edges.

Picture Mode
Here there is no playlist :-p.
The browser again only shows pictures and clicking on one will show it
fullscreen with the controlbar turing to autohide. I still need to implement
the slideshow mode but that will be easy.

The controlbar
In addition to the mode specific buttons, this applet always has a button to
return to the startup screen one button to return to the previous directory
and one button to toggle the autohide function of the control bar and to
show/hide the playlist (only music and video state). It also has a tab
widget that allows changing the browser display, like show albums, show
artists,...This doesn't work yet.

Background modes
The cool thing is, you can run these 3 modes in parallel! For example
listening to music and looking at pictures is completely possible. You can
also look at a video and have music in the background (if you think you have
to :-) In every mode you see little icons that tell you which other modes
are currently active and clicking on them switches to that mode.

Ok, so far for the little update. You see that the mediacenter is usable in
its current state but it also needs a lot of work still. I hope we will
increase our development speed exponentially as soon as Shaan comes out of
exam mode and Alessandro has more time. Currently the project lives in my
git repo on gitorious (the playlist focus on one mediatype is still on my
local drive) but I hope I can get it into svn this week and also have a nice
sexy blog post. By the way, I am almost sure that this will NOT be part of
any KDE release this year. Sorry.

I want to thank Alessandro, Marco, Shaan, Sebastian and Aaron for their
precious help and I am looking forward to further contribute with all of
you.

And here a small screenshot (sorry, I only have one video file on my netbook
so I can not show you nice picture thumbnails :-)
http://www.imagebin.ca/view/81paK7U.html


Christophe Olinger aka binarylooks


Here are some things that still need to be done:
- More dataengines like youtube, flickr, nepomuk
- keyboard, remote and wiimote control of everything
- Beautification of the UI
- Performance work
- Minimal image manipulation: rotate,...
- Zoom images and browser
- Information bar that allows rating, tagging, shows the current directory,
music analyzer,...
- Picture slideshow mode
- Lots of testing and bugfixing, this is preAlpha state!
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