Re: [Banshee-List] GSoC 2011 Ideas from Tobias

[Tobias Arrskog <tobias arrskog gmail com>]

First off, thanks everyone for all help so far! I end up creating two proposals:
* Tracker integration for Banshee
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2011/topfs2_tobias_arrskog/1
* uPnP client / server for Banshee
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2011/topfs2_tobias_arrskog/1001#

Personally I'm in favor for the former but I realize it is a bit leap
of faith as the usefulness of that proposal will only really show when
other projects also start using Tracker. I have talked to phako of
Rygel who said that a Tracker based backend for Rygel would be
interesting alas making that project having worth for the uPnP server
at some point.

I have proposed these projects to the Mono community but I was told on
IRC that Gnome have previously granted spots for Banshee also making
it useful to perhaps propose them to Gnome aswell? I am not sure how
to do this and am currently trying to find someone from Mono and Gnome
to answer but perhaps someone here knows aswell? should I just propose
and at most note that I have proposed it to both or ?

2011/3/23 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.
>