Re: GNOME Media Player draft

[Vladimir Vukicevic <vladimir helixcode com>]

On Sat, Dec 23, 2000 at 10:06:30AM -0500, Michael Meeks wrote:
> 
>         Of course, suggesting people use GMF to solve their architectural 
> problems is the right way to go. However, I would rather see a working    
> wrapped xanim control now than the promise of a beautiful system next
> year.

See http://www.intrepid.com/~vladimir/qt_evo.png . This, however,
wasn't done using GMF; it was something that I did as a quick side project
as part of gnomotion.  (The component is available in CVS module
gnomotion. It needs libquicktime.)  No AVI support yet, but I will
do that when I get around to it.  (Originally I had not wanted to support
anything but DV video -- the QT thing was done simply because it could be
done very quickly [just add a qt file type object to gnomotion], and so
that DV video inside QT files could be supported. AVI is not a priority
for the gnomotion project, but it would be something useful.)

There is definitively a lot of work that needs to be done regarding
multimedia in Gnome.  GMF has a lot of good ideas; however, I think that
some time should be spent looking at what already exists (QuickTime,
essentially), and designing a framework such that third parties will
be able to plug in their codecs (whether they be hardware or software),
their filters, etc, without requiring a massive rework of their code.

QuickTime currently holds the desktop-based NLE market, along with
a large chunk of more consumer-oriented multimedia stuff.  It's unfortunate
that Apple has not decided to port QuickTime to Linux, however doing
so would leave people with not much reason to use MacOS ;-)

Anyway, I'm going to be doing quite a bit of reading over the next
week or so, I'll post a summary of my thoughts here in the future.

	- Vlad