Plasma Media Center progress

[todd rme]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 8:46 AM, Christophe Olinger
<olingerc at binarylooks.com> wrote:
> 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!

Looks great!

Is there a list of planned features somewhere?  For instance I don't
see mention of a TV tuner dataengine, for instance, which I assume
would be a natural part of a mediacenter.  It would be good if there
were a list of planned features we could look at to know what is and
is not expected.

-Todd