Plasma Media Center Wiki page on techbase

Tue Mar 30 09:51:49 CEST 2010

I have added a "Usage workflow" part to the wiki page.What do you think?

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 8:41 AM, Christophe Olinger
<olingerc at binarylooks.com> wrote:
> Thanks Aaron,
>
> That's exactly the way we are currently going.
>
> Switching modes and having sensible controls and the right connections
> for each mode is 90 % done now. As soon as I get this out I'll start
> on the home (=startup) applet and also on the providers on the picture
> side. Digikam albums are a great idea. I'll keep that in mind.
>
> Shantanu has everything nicely summed up in his proposal. So as soon
> as he gets this out, things will become clearer.
>
> I'll also have a look at the wiki on techbase. Thank you for helping
> us out in that regard.
>
> BTW, I am currentl doing my hacking on gitorious. (I am fully aware
> that this might not be a good idea at the moment with the swtich to
> git and everything. Of yourse I'll adapt to whatever you guys chose as
> versioning option. I'll also keep on sending patches to reviewboard.
>
> git clone git://gitorious.org/plasma-media-center/mainline.git
>
> Hacking on this is turning out to be a great way of learning
> everything about plasma and dataengines and qt in general. It's my
> first big project and it is a lot of fun.
>
> Could somebody have a look at the current patch in reviewboard please.
> I am sometimes a bit afraid that I am running in the wrong direction,
> since this is my first complex project.
>
>
> Cheers everybody
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 9:21 PM, Shantanu Tushar Jha
> <jhahoneyk at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 12:32 AM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
>>> On March 26, 2010, Christophe Olinger wrote:
>>>> This is not 100 % true. At the moment Shantanu and me try to have it
>>>> also scale down to netbook size screens. This will be a bigger user
>>>> base in the future than big tv screens IMHO. Also that is my
>>>
>>> i should have been more specific. by "large screens" i meant things larger
>>> than the n900 or the Jax10's we had at tokamak 4.
>>>
>>> i think a primary use case for PMC will be laptops, with T.V.s being a
>>> secodary one.
>>>
>>> as Zack points out, more important than screen size, however, is the input
>>> device. on pocketable devices, that is your finger (or, at worst, a stylus).
>>> on laptops, that's a keyboard and mouse. on a T.V. it's a hand-held remote
>>> control.
>>>
>>> i don't think we can sanely target both pocketable devices and laptops/T.V.s
>>> due to this. i do think we can target both laptops and T.V.s, however. the
>>> reason for this is that while the T.V. is limited by a remote control input,
>>> on the laptop use case when one fires up a full screen mediacenter (which is
>>> what PMC should be) you want to go into a simplified user experience that is
>>> centered around media viewing.
>>>
>>> if you want something richer, that doesn't take over the whole display and
>>> with more point-and-click finesse, that's what apps like kaffeine and amarok
>>> are for.
>>>
>>> this means that PMC only needs to address the same audiences that plasma-
>>> desktop or plasma-netbook would, and should be aiming for a UI that is clear
>>> enough that even a remote control is good enough.
>>>
>>> to go down this path a little bit more, even, here are some typical use cases
>>> i have in mind for PMC based on observation of today's typical computer user:
>>>
>>> * Joe is on a train / airplane travelling between two cities. The trip is long
>>> enough to watch the latest episode of his favourite T.V. show which he
>>> downloaded the night before from his PVR at home. Joe pops open his laptop,
>>> clicks on the Desktop Toolbox and selects "Media Center". PMC loads and he
>>> selects "Video", which presents a list of videos on his internal hard drive.
>>>
>>> * Jane is at home and wants to show her dinner guests pictures from the recent
>>> weekend trip she went on. Jane plugs her laptop into the living room
>>> television, opens the application launcher (Kickoff, Lancelot) and selects
>>> "Media Center". PMC starts up and she selects "Photos" which shows various
>>> sets of photo albums. After going through the "Weekend Ski Trip" photos, she
>>> goes back and selects Videos -> Youtube and loads a Youtube playlist of top 40
>>> music videos to play in the background while they visit.
>>>
>>> * Jaqueline sits down on the couch with her husband Jack and they turn on the
>>> television and their Plasma Media Center set top box. They grab the remote
>>> control and check the videos that they had recorded / downloaded but haven't
>>> watched yet. They select an episode of House and another of Fawlty Towers and
>>> press "Play".
>>>
>>> now, these are the use cases i have in my mind. they may be different from
>>> those working on PMC have. hopefully not, but it's certainly possible. :) we
>>> should therefore get to documenting what's being done here. i've gone ahead
>>> and started a page here:
>>>
>>>        http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Plasma/Plasma_Media_Center
>>>
>>> feel free to change any and all content and add, add, add more to it.
>>
>> Good idea, I'll be at it.
>>
>>>
>>> the use cases above do provide some interesting insights, though: it would be
>>> sensible to have a Digikam photo provider for PMC so that one can create their
>>> photo albums in Digikam and then later view those same albums in PMC. it would
>>> be sensible to have some notion of what's been watched and be able to set up
>>> simple "playlists" by selecting mutiple items from a list of available media.
>>> it doesn't matter if PMC works on the N900 well.
>>>
>>> thoughts?
>>>
>>> --
>>> Aaron J. Seigo
>>> humru othro a kohnu se
>>> GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43
>>>
>>> KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Plasma-devel mailing list
>>> Plasma-devel at kde.org
>>> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Shantanu Tushar    (UTC +0530)
>> http://www.shantanutushar.com
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
>