Plasma Media Center Wiki page on techbase

Tue Mar 30 10:03:12 CEST 2010

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 1:21 PM, Christophe Olinger
<olingerc at binarylooks.com> wrote:
> I have added a "Usage workflow" part to the wiki page.What do you think?

Should be fine. Also, I've been trying to edit the page for a long
time now, but the editor simply refuses to load. Maybe problem with
the connection. Can you also include the work distribution which we
decided on the wiki in the TODO in this format -

    Job To be Done                Assignee

Do cool stuff with MC          Christophe

Hope it'll be nice :)

>
> 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
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>>>> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Shantanu Tushar    (UTC +0530)
>>> http://www.shantanutushar.com
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
>>>
>>
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-- 
Shantanu Tushar    (UTC +0530)
http://www.shantanutushar.com