Re: Call for a Gnome Media Center

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Tue, 2007-02-13 at 17:51 +0100, Christian F.K. Schaller wrote:
> Hi,
> Thought someone from Fluendo should chime in on this as Elisa been
> mentioned. In general we would be interested in having Elisa
> be the media center add-on to GNOME. So the question is what the
> community would expect from a 'GNOME media center'. 
> 
> We are already using as mentioned by many gnome related technologies,
> but since the media center GUI is so different we feel a lot of the
> stack is not really relevant, the same goes for the HIG. While we try to
> do intelligent GUI design with Elisa there is IMHO not really that much
> of the HIG that applies directly, but of course we try to use it for
> inspiration.
> 
> We do want to integrate as widely as possible with other applications,
> be that through upnp a/v and DAAP etc. and I think that it would be
> mutually beneficial for both Elisa and the rest of the media
> applications if we managed to create a standard for how to store media
> files in the form of a certain directory layout and naming and so on.
> 
that should be the first step. Right now, I have to create separate
music databases whether I use banshee or rhythmbox (or at least that's
how it was last times I switched from one to the other).

Also, making this 'database' keep videos, photos, etc, would be a good
first step.

> I guess from our point of view we would be interested in hearing what
> requirements/expectations people have for something like a media center
> solution to be included as a 'part of GNOME'.
> 
> A media center interface is in some sense an alternative GUI to the
> desktop, so my thinking so far is that we should both do a GNOME menu
> entry for Elisa and a GDM entry to log directly into Elisa.
> 
for the GNOME interface (to be run on a GNOME desktop), I really think
this is very much needed. While we, at least myself, are ok with music
(rhythmbox and banshee are great) and photos (gthumb and f-spot), we
have nothing similar to this for videos. It would so be really nice to
have a simple interface to all your music and videos and photos, without
having to run the full GDM Elisa session.
-- 
Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>