Re: Call for a Gnome Media Center

["John Stowers" <john stowers lists gmail com>]

> Mandriva provide default directory layout for Music, image, etc. How do
> Mac OS X ? I guess we should have something similar to g_get_home_dir
> (), g_get_config_dir () for media. This should be done in XDG.

This sounds a bit like we are doing the job of the computer here. To a
large extent I dont care where my photos are, where my music is,
directories are soooo 1990's. I just want it to show in my media
center.

A rich desktop wide metadata store will be able to find all my music
for free, find all my photos. My mum likes to store things in "My
Pictures" but when she forgets then she is practically lost when it
comes to tracking down here files....

We can improve the situation by agreeing on sane defaults, XDG wide,
or we can embrace a system where we are free from remembering where we
store stuff.

I could explicitly plug tracker here but im sure other wasabi [0]
compatible systems will get the job done.

In the case of a media center (im thinking of xbox media center
because thats what I use but the concept is general enough) A
directory based layout is practically never shown to the user anyway,
its "Songs by this artist" "Photos from this week" etc. It therefor
seems unneeded work to create a standard directory layout for Music
etc when its going to need to be presented to the user in a whole
bunch of new ways. Let alone the corner cases that are going to be
hard to cover. I dont think a hard coded approach scales...

So lets embrace a GNOME desktop where the heavy lifting is done for us
and we use the metadata from the files. Ive said it before but Tracker
[1] can facilitate these use cases, and more.

John

[0] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/WasabiAbout
[1] http://www.gnome.org/projects/tracker/

> Étienne.
>
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