[Banshee-List] GSoC 2011 Ideas from Tobias

[Tobias Arrskog <tobias arrskog gmail com>]

Hi, my name is Tobias (topfs2) Arrskog and I have developed for XBMC
Media Center for a few years now and have been using banshee for most
of my music playback needs when using the desktop. Our community was
sadly not choosen for GSoC 2011 and as such I started looking for
other communities I might be able to do some work in when I noticed
that mono proposed work on any application using their framework (and
banshee as an example) and I thought, hey that would be fun way to get
into a new community and to code for yet another app I use :)

I have programmed C# a lot previously (was the language I learnt first
and I have used it for asp.net in other summer work). I'm in my fourth
year of computer science in Sweden and have was coding for GSoC 2010
in the beagleboard community to optimize xbmc for that platform.
Without rambling on to much about myself (if anything just ask and
I'll be glad to fill in the blanks) here are a few ideas I came up
with after searching through your bugreport list, talking to some devs
in #banshee and from using the app, also some ideas comes from
problems we have in xbmc which may hold true for this community as
well.

The proposals I have here does not contain to much about
implementation ideas, I have deliberitely not written that to not make
this post to long. I'd love to hear your ideas and to discuss stuff
further on any ideas which are good though :)

''Session wide media library''
This idea is meant to make applications made for the same desktop
environment able to share information about what media the user has.
The mantra currently is that each app has its own library and there is
no coexistence between the applications. The current design with each
application handling it seems to me somewhat of a remenant from when a
desktop environment consists of just one media application and when
there wasn't to much need to switch between the applications.

This doesn't hold true any longer and media is something consumed all
the time and in very different types of ways, as such it makes sense
to have specialized applications for each consumption type but they
still could share the data. The idea I propose is to make a session
wide daemon (dbus?) which handles all metadata information about the
media the session / user has. Each application (banshee, rhythmbox,
elisa, xbmc etc.) all can connect to this daemon and gather the
information without any setup.

User scenarios:
* A desktop user who normally uses banshee for his/her media
consumption but when sitting down in the sofa and wants to consume the
media on the TV can launch elisa and everything which existed in
banshee exists in elisa, without any configuration or syncing.
* A gnome user has used rhythmbox but hear from a friend that banshee
is better, he installs it and when he launches banshee all his media
is ready to be used without any need for configuration.

I realize that this proposal is perhaps more intended for gnome in
general but I wanted your thoughts on the matter and if you like the
idea I'll propose it to gnome people as well.

''Split video to movies, series etc.''
In banshee videos is still somewhat young but there is no real reason
why it couldn't handle video playback as nice as it does music. First
step to do this is to split video into the types it really is and
display them nicer. Sadly video objects doesn't really contain taggs
as we are fortunate to have with audio files but the naming of the
files usually tell quite a bit, as such one can take out much info
from the filename and then go past and scrape imdb/themoviedb etc for
the metadata wanted. After the metadata is scraped one can split
movies by genre and series by show/season etc, making traversing the
media a bliss.

''Integration with gnome3''
While most of banshee handles quite well with gnome 3 it still does
not work perfectly and there are a few "bugs" which would need to be
sorted out. For example the system bar is not working the same so its
very simple to accidently "close" banshee and it is nowhere to be
found in the GUI, only real way to handle that is currently to kill
it.

The system bar is quite redesigned and banshee does not work as in
gnome2 with it, even though it should.

I'm sure there are a few more stuff which needs love regards to gnome
3 but I'm still quite new to gnome3 overall (just made the switch).

''Make banshee able to share content''
This is tangential with the first proposal and I came to this idea
when I read about this bugreport: (I realize that bugreport is about
DAAP though :) ). What I mean by tangential is that perhaps it would
be better to implement the session wide library proposal which rygel
then could always check, that way an application never have to care
about the sharing. Drifting a bit "off-topic" one proposal could still
be to integrate banshee with different server libraries, amongst those
could be to integrate it with DAAP# and/or with Rygel.