Re: 3.6 Feature: Totem -> Videos

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Mon, 2012-04-23 at 21:09 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-04-23 at 17:52 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > Work is on-going to make Totem into that:
> > https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Videos#Tentative_Design
> 
> The thumbnail view looks really nice!  And the searching in
> YouTube/Vimeo/etc. looks very good for when you are in a "I don't know
> what to watch" mood.  (Did those sites finally get a clue about letting
> you view videos outside their web pages?)

No. Totem doesn't implement any code specific to those websites and
grilo handles the browsing, and quvi (through totem-pl-parser) passing
us a video URL we can play back.

> Personally what would most improve my Totem experience would be:
> 
> * Tivo-like pausing.  The phone rings and you stop paying attention to
> the TV or screen; by the time you hit Pause you've missed some of the
> movie's conversation, so you then need to rewind a bit, which is
> awkward.

Ring buffer supports needs (or rather needed) work on the GStreamer
side. I haven't looked into it since the last round of buffering
improvements (when we added download buffering), but it should be
implementable now. Feel free to file a bug, I thought we already had one
but I guess not.

> * Easier ways to seek than the current slider, or a drop-dead obvious
> way to set up a bookmark or something.  We watch an episode of $series
> right before going to bed, but if one of us falls asleep, the other one
> has to remember the rough minute:second marker for the next day (the
> video window gets closed in the daytime - got real work to do!).  (You
> know how Evince remembers the position at which you were reading a PDF?
> maybe something like that would work for Totem - remember the position
> for each video?)

Totem already does that, and has for a while:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164918

We have some other improvements planned for session management though:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=582036

> * Some sort of connection with a BitTorrent client.  I know this is
> treading on taboo ground, but I assume that a lot of people download
> torrents and then manually have to select which of the downloaded files
> to view with Totem - it's just cumbersome.

We'll either use Tracker or monitor some directories to look for new,
local videos. You'll just need to configure your download system to put
them in the right location once done.

Cheers