Plasma Media Center progress

[Shantanu Tushar Jha]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 8:19 PM, todd rme <toddrme2178 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

You can find one here
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Plasma/Plasma_Media_Center
 Though its not that complete, but its kind of an overview of what we
plan to do.

>
> -Todd
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-- 
Shantanu Tushar    (UTC +0530)
http://www.shantanutushar.com