[Plasma Media Center] some advice request

Alessandro Diaferia alediaferia at gmail.com
Fri Jun 4 21:51:42 CEST 2010


Hello everybody.
As some of you may already know I'm currently trying to guide the Plasma
Media Center project and I'm quite happy with the results we are achieving.

The project is still highly work in progress and therefore we have issues
here and there i'd like to point out in this mail.

The first *big* issue we have is Phonon; and this is a relevant one since
our business are Media resources.
Phonon::VideoWidget inside a QGW sucks great and currently we also have that
white-skin people are rendered blue (yeah, like Avatar).
I already mentioned the aim is to show the video full screen and having it
embedded inside a QGW is way ugly as it is rendered badly.
I did some investigation and found out that probably QtMultimedia will help
us fix this.
Unfortunately QtMultimedia won't be shipped until Qt 4.8 and so a decision
in this direction has to be taken.
At the very beginning we had the idea to put a plain VideoWidget behind the
transparent-made containment (really, the Plasma::View)
but IIRC this is not possible as long as there is a window registered as
desktop in the WM.
The second idea was to continuously ask the VideoWidget for snapshot()s and
directly paint them over the QGW.
I tried this but it is really really bad performing.
One more test was done trying to redirect the painting, specifically doing
it with grabWidget. But this seems not to be possible
as the Phonon::VideoWidget is not a pure QWidget. grabWindow is not possible
as the window should be hidden.
Please correct me if I'm wrong and point out some advice.
Also, no way i should try to already make use of QtMultimedia in place of
Phonon for the QGraphics* stuff?

The second aim we have is to allow different kind of inputs to be used for
the Media Center interaction.
Me and Sebas were investigating wiimote capabilities and later Sebas pointed
out this project [0].
It seems to me really well done with a good level of abstraction for the wii
controllers.
I already contacted the author in order to have more info about that but
unfortunately he still didn't reply.
My concern about this regards how making the input handling enough "general"
to be extended via wiimote plugins and stuff like that.
For example, currently the browsing applet handles keyEvents in order to
move the selection indicator.
How should I handle such events in order to allow further extension via
other kind of input devices? Any hint for me?

I'd like such points to be discussed before we reach akademy so that I'll
introduce our approaches in such aspects.

Thank you for your time.

P.S.: Also, shall I CC some other ML that might be interested in this? If
so, can you suggest which ones?

[0] http://gitorious.org/wiimotedev

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