Re: Call for a Gnome Media Center

["Christian F.K. Schaller" <christian fluendo com>]

Well I am not sure how 'huge' this effort needs to be as we have a lot
of these places implicitly in place already. Everything uses GStreamer
which means a shared library and a lot of shared code already. A recent
example here is that I know both Rhythmbox and Exaile hackers are
working on adding Equalizer support, both helping out with and using a
new Equalizer plugin recently added to gst-plugins-bad CVS.

On top of that there is a lot of direct code sharing between the
projects, like Rhythmbox (and I think others) using Totems playlist
parser library as one example.

For UI conventions most of these apps tries hard to follow the GNOME UI
guidelines, but as I mentioned before I am not sure this is relevant for
Elisa as Elisa is a GUI targeted at use with a remote control, not a
mouse and keyboard, which makes 'desktop' UI conventions a bit off.

As for a shared database this might be a good idea, but I will leave
that up to application writers to decide, for me a good start would be
that all Music applications for instance tried hard to get people to
save their Music under $HOME/Music for instance. That way when you start
another Music application or Elisa you don't need to specify which
directory to look for Music inn. Similar conventions would be good for
pictures and movies and album/dvd cover art. 

Christian


On Tue, 2007-02-13 at 18:15 +0000, Alex Jones wrote:
> I think what is needed here is an (albeit huge) co-ordinated effort into
> some kind of GNOME Media system, where a video player (Totem) and a
> music jukebox (Rhythmbox) and a media centre (???) can share code,
> libraries, UI conventions, and importantly, one database.
> 
> I don't see a lot of point in bouncing along otherwise - I fear the
> result will be a half-baked mess with no consistency.
> 
> On Tue, 2007-02-13 at 19:13 +0100, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> > 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.