Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Video for Rhythmbox

["James \"Doc\" Livingston" <doclivingston gmail com>]

On Sat, 2006-07-29 at 00:12 +0100, Mark Hewitt wrote:
> There was some talk a little while ago about incorporating a frontend
> for gstreamer video capabilities, maybe as a plugin. Is anyone looking
> at this right now? (I sincerely wish I could contribute with some code,
> but my coding is still very much neophyte stuff). I know people will say
> "we have to keep focus, and RB is an audio application, we don't want to
> get distracted with video features", but basically there is no good
> media library/player out there with video support, because everyone
> focusses on making the best audio player! Xine is best for video, but
> doesn't do the sexy stuff RB does as far as indexing big collections of
> files etc. I'd love to be able to add vids to my RB library and play
> them in the main window, rather than the clumsy Xine solution, spawning
> a new window for each window and so on. What do people think?

I'll repeat the main comment I made last time: I'm not sure how this
fits well into Rhythmbox. But that doesn't mean it can't fit in, it's
just that right now I don't know how.

Not being able to (or not wanting to) code is fine, right now design is
much more important. I have no idea how iTunes does it's video-related
stuff, or if it's design works for it, but this is what first springs to
mind for me:

* Have a "Videos" source similar to the Library one
* Make RB smart and be able to put audio in the audio library, and video
in the Video one
* The "columns of info" layout probably wouldn't work well for video,
particular since video usually has crappy metadata. Maybe a thumbnail
the size of (say) three rows on the left, and the right side filled with
some metadata.
* Some browser-like thing, so I can easily look at "Episodes of X", "The
Y movies" or "everything else".

This will need input from a quite a few people, to decide what might
work well. If there are any existing apps that do this kind of things,
taking a look at them would be good.


On the technical side, supporting this would require changes to
Rhythmbox's core. But for the most part we're happy to adapt things if
something needs it, and many of the changes are needed for other things:
display video is fairly similar to displaying visualisations, we've been
talking about better "track" listings for podcasts etc.


If people want a plugin that does this kind of thing, the first thing to
do is figure out how it would work (for a user point of view), and so
what we would actually need to do.


Cheers,

James "Doc" Livingston
-- 
To bowl a maiden over:
i. Remove Cover and Extra Cover.
ii. Move fine leg to square leg.
Hmm, I can't seem to think of a way to finish this. -- Sid on RHOD