PMC use case

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Monday 29 March 2010 21:02:06 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> thoughts?

I don't agree with the "PMC should target notebooks" as primary usecase bit. I really 
think that this thing should be developed to have its UI run on a TV, preferably HD-
Ready or Full-HD resolution. Those devices tend to be easily hooked up with a 
computer nowadays (as Jane knows), (ours has both HDMI and D-Sub and is also a fine 
monitor). The key difference is wether to rely on a mouse pointer or not, and how 
interaction looks like otherwise.

Now that's of course me being selfish, because I, at some point, want to use PMC on 
this kind of device as my Media Center. What I have in mind is roughly:

- PMC running on a netbook or comparatively cheap hardware
- easily controllable from a 10 foot distance, using a remote control or a wiimote
- connected to the Internet, so web video (youtube, blip, miro, ...) should be first 
  class citizens
- access to the local and networked media library (in the same way ("it doesn't 
  matter where it's stored") via SMB, uPnP, HTTP
- built-in web browser that's basically usable by a remote / wiimote(*) as well
- full-screen media player with overlaid Plasma widgets to control playback and 
  playlist
- good bookmarking support (favourites for web and local videos, easy way to 
  find/remember the current/next episode of a TV show)
- contextual information for content (Nepomuk, IMDB, discogs, ...)
- Remotely editable playlist (pull up your notebook / n900 and edit the playlist on 
  the PMC without interrupting playback)

The key is really to support commodity hardware, things people already have or can 
get rather inexpensively and turn it into a media center with little effort 
(basically install PMC, and hook up the TV to it).

(*) I've played around with a wiimote last weekend and now have a Qt-style class that 
can be used to interact with the features of a wiimote, buttons, LEDs, accelerometers 
and haptic feedback at this point. I've got myself a copy of O'Reilly's "designing 
gestural interfaces", and I think we can get quite far, from a functionality and an 
intuitiveness point of view by using such a device as main controller. That's 
something I work on in a lost hour here and there.

Some of the above are quite specific ideas, and it might be different from what other 
people think about it. In any event, while developing, please keep the above in mind, 
so I won't have to do it all myself when I scratch my itches. :)

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org | GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9