Re: new module proposal: brasero

[Philippe Rouquier <rouquier p wanadoo fr>]

Hi,

Le lundi 03 novembre 2008 à 00:52 +0000, Bastien Nocera a écrit :

> Let me write the supposed workflow for CD burning in GNOME (that's not
> quite what it is currently):
>
> * Media is inserted first
> - User inserts blank media
> - The CD creator window opens up inviting the user to add files to the
> location to burn onto a CD
> - User clicks "write to CD"
> - nautilus-cd-burner opens, click write, done
That is already possible with 0.8.3 (still in SVN trunk). I split brasero's desktop files into copy-medium, open-image, open-playlist (thanks to totem-pl-parser ;)), open-project desktop files (all invisible of course).

So in the above example when a user inserts a blank disc, the nautilus dialog box "What should we do with this?" pops up and offers the possibility to "Burn the disc with brasero". If that option is chosen, then brasero opens a new data project and the user can add files as he does in nautilus.

One advantage I see with brasero is that the user can have a GtkFileChooser next to his project or and "Add" button which is a lot handier than in nautilus when he wants to pick files.  With NCB, once the CD creator window is open, it's probably empty which means that the user will have to go somewhere else to pick files and go back afterwards to the CD creator. It means going back and forth between the source folder and the CD creator window. A new user can get confused to be presented an empty selection without any clue to tell him how to fill it. IMO I don't think this is really straightforward.

If on the other hand he had already picked files and added them before he inserted the blank disc, then that's not a problem either since brasero can handle burn://  URI and use it. So instead of opening a blank data project brasero can open a new data project with burn:// URI contents. True, at the moment, this is not brasero behavior but brasero can open burn:// URI so it's just a matter of checking whether of not burn:// URI is empty.

If the disc has data on it the copy medium desktop file will be used with the string (not exactly this one since I don't have it in mind)  "Copy the disc with Brasero", and so on.

I've just realized, that two other desktop files are missing for the latter case, which is "Blank with Brasero" and "Verify integrity with Brasero". But that can be done.

I don't see any difference with NCB behavior except for one thing: brasero is not opened IN nautilus. And as I stated above, I don't see that as an advantage for NCB given that if the user had not already chosen a set of files to be burnt, he'll just have an empty selection ...

Now, what benefits are to be found in using brasero compared to NCB?
- the user wants to remember this set of files because they are important and he wants to back them up again next week, brasero can save this set in a project
- the user inserted a medium with data, and he wants to add files to the last session, brasero can handle the multisession case.
- the user wants to check the files integrity on his disc (provided it was written with brasero), he can
- his burnt medium will be checksumed to make sure it was properly written 
- brasero can handle files from remote mounted shares in nautilus
- say you mounted a FTP or samba share, it can also download the SHA1, MD5 file and once burnt checksum the burnt medium and check it was properly burnt
- brasero checks the mimetypes in the project and if it finds only an image file, it will offer to burn the image and not create another image with the image inside (but maybe NCB does this too? I haven't checked)

> * User knows they want to create a CD:
> - User scours the menus, finds the "CD/DVD creator" under System Tools
> - Window is inviting the user to add files
> - Clicks write to CD
> - nautilus-cd-burner opens, click write, a disc will be requested, done
That could be done IF the menu entry in the panel was configurable... which is not.

Among the things you mentioned, what brasero doesn't do is start IN nautilus but all other things are handled (so far as I understand it of course).

> The 3rd option is integration into applications. Rhythmbox allows to
> burn audio CDs from existing playlists, gthumb allows burning CDs/DVDs
> from image albums and image folders.
Integration with banshee is already done and works as far as I know. I could write plugins to integrate brasero in rhythmbox / gthumb. There was a bug filed for rhtyhmbox once about that but I was too busy with brasero to fix it.

There are other benefits for audio projects:
- normalization of audio tracks
- possibility to create covers for your album (needs further work to have musicbrainz integration though to retrieve the covers)

> Brasero currently only offers an answer to the second option. And what
> we're really looking for is an answer for option 3. I'll take patches to
> create Video DVDs from a Totem playlist, and I'm sure Pitivi hackers
> would be happy for it to have the same treatment.
Same as above, I'd be glad to do/help it.


Philippe