Plasma Media Center progress

[Alessandro Diaferia]

2010/4/21 Christophe Olinger <olingerc at binarylooks.com>

> 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.
>

The love you're putting inside this project is admirable with no doubt :-).
The release stuff is something probably a bit early to think about since we
want users to be happy since from the first release (at least i'd like to :)
and therefore i was thinking about making this project an extragear one. But
i'm not so updated with release stuff so you probably can suggest something
that suits better.


>
> 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
>

Youtube and flickr dataengines are there though :p Likely we'll have some
more love for them if the PMC API and DataEngines GSoC proposal gets
accepted


> - keyboard, remote and wiimote control of everything
> - Beautification of the UI
>

+1 of course!  The states stuff will ensure this to be accomplished!

- Performance work
>

I wanted to look into this some time ago. Will do next week most probably!


> - 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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>
Anyway let's all keep trying to make this project rock :-)

Cheers

-- 
Alessandro Diaferia
KDE Developer
KDE e.V. member
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