Re: Video and other media. Where to draw the line?

[Warren Baird <photogeekmtl gmail com>]

I'm not really an f-spot developer, beyond some patches, but I've done 
my share of OOAD, so I'll take a stab at answering.

I really don't think that f-spot should become a video editing suite - 
probably not even to the level of the way it edits photos currently.   I 
don't even think it should try to be a video player.

But I do think showing thumbnails from the video, and then launching a 
player or editor would definitely be convenient.

Michael Wayne Goodman wrote:
> Q1. What do you think is the best way to structure the classes (of the
> three options above)

well - this sounds like a textbook case of inheritance...  It looks like 
ImageFile is only used in around 70 places, so it might not be *that* 
annoying to change most/all of the occurences to MediaFile, so I'd say 
that option 3 sounds best to me.

I would be interested in seeing how you plan to split things up between 
the 3 classes --- my feeling is that both ImageFile and VideoFile would 
be pretty thin...

> Q2. If we add video support, where do we draw the line with F-Spot?
> Obviously we don't want to make a full file manager with a slideshow
> function.  But a good rule of thumb might be that we should handle
> everything, and only, what a digital camera can take.  Right now, I
> believe that is photos, videos, and audio clips (which I think are
> attached to photos).

I certainly would like to be able to use a single package to track all 
of the things that come off my digital camera.     I would perhaps argue 
that we should only worry about audio clips attached to photos --- if 
someone is using their camera as a purely audio recorder, that sounds 
outside of f-spot's scope.

> Q3. Assuming we add video support, what features would be necessary?
> I think editing should be left up to an external editor, although it
> might be feasible to do very simple things like truncating or adding a
> title screen (compare to what we do with photos, for instance).
> Exporting to services like YouTube would be quite nice as well.
> Q4. What is the minimum amount of expected functionality required for
> a patch to be accepted?  (ie. there's lots we could do, but we should
> keep it small first)

As I said before, I don't think it really makes sense to try to do any 
video editing in f-spot, and I'm not even sure we should try playing the 
videos directly - given the number of good video players out there, 
don't re-invent the wheel.

Exporting to various video sharing services would be pretty nice, though.

Warren