Re: Call for a Gnome Media Center

[Florian Boucault <florian boucault ath cx>]

Hello,

Before thinking about a media centre for GNOME, it is really important
to understand that any media centre relies heavily on indexed metadata.
As a developer of the Elisa media centre, I would rather focus on
usability issue and multimedia features than on doing over and over
again the indexing chore.
Therefore, I feel a need for the 3 following things, which would all be
very profitable to any media centre and of course to the GNOME desktop
multimedia experience:

1) A common metadata specification.

2) A piece of software which is able to scan files locally and over any
network protocol and to index the metadata it finds.

3) A common API to access these metadata.


1) is already under development on the freedesktop wiki:
http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards/shared-filemetadata-spec

2) Tracker is on its way to fill the need thanks to Jamie McCracken and
the Tracker team (http://live.gnome.org/Tracker), and was proposed for
inclusion in GNOME 2.18
(http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2007-January/msg00083.html). As far as I know, it lacks of network transparency and does more than indexing metadata but also indexes content. As Emmanuele Bassi noted (http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2007-January/msg00090.html), one should consider Tracker-the-indexer here, not the whole bundle.

3) Tracker provides a D-BUS API to access the metadata, and if I
remember correctly, a library which wraps it.


Have a nice day!

Florian

On Tue, 2007-02-13 at 15:39 -0500, Martin Meyer wrote:
> I for one would like to see a network file browser of some kind in any
> media center app. If I run this Gnome Media Center on an HTPC in my
> living room, I want to be able to access the media stored *anywhere*
> in my house. The majority of it is on my desktop, but when someone
> comes over with a Windows laptop and I want to play a video off it,
> I'm not going to want to open an SSH window and mount the share!
> I guess my main point is that not all video you want to play needs to
> be in your "Personal Media Database" thing, it could be anywhere. This
> volatile media doesn't need to remain present after it's played.
> 
> I know this is not really at the core of this discussion but I think
> it's an important consideration for such an application to be
> successful. If this is a real Gnome Media Center then Nautilus should
> be able to provide some assistance here, no? After all, totem and
> mplayer and xine all support playing directly from smb shares.
> 
> Martin Meyer
> 
> On 2/13/07, Alex Jones <alex weej com> 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.
> > --
> > Alex Jones
> > http://alex.weej.com/
> >
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> >
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