Plasma Media Center progress

[todd rme]

On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 2:05 AM, Christophe Olinger
<olingerc at binarylooks.com> wrote:
> Same conclusion from my side. First the basic fucntionality and UI polish,
> then feature additions.
>
> I also agree with Alessandro that extragear sounds like a good home, but as
> was side before: in due time.
>
> I finished the slideshow part yesterday and hope I can submit to reviewboard
> this afternoon.
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Christophe Olinger
>
> On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 8:20 PM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
>>
>> On April 22, 2010, Christopher Blauvelt wrote:
>>
>> > Recording the incoming signal is not the difficult part. The difficult
>>
>> > part is the management. Scheduling recordings, storing recordings,
>>
>> > deconflicting recordings given a variable number of tv tuners, receiving
>>
>> > and processing accuarate show scheduling information. These are
>>
>> > non-trivial items which took the MythTV folks a while to get right. If
>>
>> > we're going to go down this route, I think it would make more sense to
>>
>> > connect to the MythTV backend (whether remote or on the local machine)
>> > and
>>
>> > manage recordings that way, but all in due time.
>>
>> agreed, on both conclusions :)
>>
>> --
>>
>> Aaron J. Seigo


I was thinking, many of the features of plasma media center also have
applicability to plasma as a whole.  For instance many people on the
forums have been requesting a video wallpaper (just a simple loop, no
controls or anything).  The playlist features would be useful for
organizing music, videos, or pictures, even if they only launched the
default program for the given mimetype without any real playlist
functionality.  The media control interface could be used to
manipulate MPRIS-compatible software.  So I thought it might be
worthwhile, once each feature is in at least a semi-usable state, that
it would be spun off into an independent plasma wallpaper, widget,
data engine, or so on (at least for features for which this is
useful), probably in playground.

This might be a little more work, but it has some advantages.  First,
it guarantees that features are not tied to a specific plasma
implementation, which, as I understand it, is the whole point of
plasma.  Second, it allows people to begin testing the features
one-by-one before the whole media center is released.  This will
likely be critical for things like the video background, which is both
the most-desired feature for standard plasma and also likely the one
with the most hardware and kernel/xorg-specific bugs that would be
hard to find otherwise.  Finally, it will likely encourage
contributions to PMC, since people will be using the features and want
to improve them.

I apologize if this is either infeasible, undesirable, or already
planned, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

-Todd