[PATCH] Add option of adding new playlists to Plasma Media Center

[Christophe Olinger]

Concerning the Media Center, I am also currently doing a lot of
hacking on it. Basically I am trying to see how one can use the media
center on a smaller screen. My first idea was to use a screen edge
widget (at the moment I call it combinedControl and it sits at the
bottom) which listens to what the user is currently doing and adapts
accordingly. I imagine the following use cases:
* The media center starts in a browsing mode in grid view. The
combined control shows a home button and a button to go up one
directory. Also there will be a playlist button that pops up the
playlist on one part of the screen. the initial browser view would
show an icon for music collection, picture gallery and video gallery,
but also a simple file browse mode.
* If in file browse mode, the user selects an item. The combined
control shows meta data related stuff like tags, rating, etc. Also
there would be an "add to playlist button" and a button that switches
to playback mode with the current item shown in it.
* If the user double clicks on an item, the media center will turn
into playback mode, the same as with the button above.
* In playback mode, the combined control panel will have playback
controls for video, or simple manipulation buttons for pictures
depending on what is being looked at plus a button to turn back to
browser mode
* In playback mode, the combinedControl panel will become autohidable
but can also be pinned.

So basically I am trying to have all controls combined in a single
location and only relevant actions should be available. At the moment
I have added a "Small screen mode" checkbox to a containment
configuration which adds this combinedControl panel and tells the
other applets to relayout accordingly.

In the end it will look a bit like nuno's mockups in the mockup
folder. I will also adapt the sizes of icons in the browser maybe with
a zoom slider to show more or less previews on the screen and to be
smalls screen friendly.

What do you think? Is this useful at all?

I used the "Small screen mode" idea, because after a discussion with
Alessandro we thought that maybe separating big TV screen and small
netbook/tablet screen use cases but with keeping the same core
libraries.

Cheers,

Christophe

On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 6:38 PM, Marco Martin <notmart at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Friday 19 March 2010, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
>> On March 18, 2010, Alessandro Diaferia wrote:
>> > Please use reviewboard. I still didn't have a look at the patch but i
>> > feel reviewboard is much better in order to point out eventual issues.
>> > The issue with video inside mediacenter is due to Phonon and the
>> > VideoWidget embedded inside a QGraphicsWidget, so it shouldn't be you
>> > :-).
>>
>> this is perhaps going to sound a bit odd and perhaps even contradictory to
>> past direction elsewhere (e.g. to how we do things with plasma-desktop) but
>> it probably makes a lot more sense for the media player to show video in a
>> separate window that is positioned without window borders.
>>
>> that will allow video to be played using xvideo or whatever which is going
>> to be a hell of a lot faster in these cases than pushing it through the
>> QGrahicsScene.
>>
>> if one wants to have overlays on top of the video, then i'd suggest putting
>> the video window _behind_ the Plasma::View window and paint the background
>> of the Plasma::View transparent. this means requiring compositing, but
>> that's ok in this case afaic.
>>
>> (this, btw, is exactly what some of the other linux based media centers do)
>>
>> anyone else have thoughts?
>
> yes, this is how i wanted it to proceed.
> and is already semi began, since is possible to have a video as a separate
> window, what is still needed is the making the View transparent and on top of
> it.
> it would become a kinda dashboard like thinghie
>
> --
> Marco Martin
> _______________________________________________
> Plasma-devel mailing list
> Plasma-devel at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
>