GSOC 2012 proposal & viability

[Prashanth Ravi <dare take gmail com>]

I am Comp Sc Bachelor's student from India. For my final year project I am developing a media player using Win32 API,libavcodec etc. One of the features of the above mentioned player was to integrate into the file explorer and make it easier for users to select the files that they want to play. 

I am submitting a brief idea of this feature so that any of the users in the mailing list could tell me whether it's useful and/or viable on GNOME.

Problem:

X has a large video collection contained within different levels of sub directories.Unlike audio files(mp3/ogg etc.) most video files do not have tags associated with them.

Of course you can add tags or other metadata, but unlike the audio file, videos rarely have an artist/album or title. X wants to play select files.

Solutions:

1.Include a screenshot of the file within the file manager 

2.Include continuous screenshots of the file in the file manager

3.Include a quick play feature, ie the user can play the file in another pane.

for #1,#2 & #3,will the user have to drag and drop each file one by one to the player? What if each video is in a different directory?

Links to UI mock up,

http://flic.kr/p/bFyCwK

http://flic.kr/p/bsDKVd

Proposal:

1.For directories containing video files, the file explorer provides a playlist/listbox to add them.

2.User can play file, if he likes it, he adds it to the playlist.

3.The playlist is persistent across directories.

4.After finalizing, he can click a button and the default video player starts with the playlist.

Notes:

I have a collection of music videos and "drag and drop" was the only solution for me , this feature was inspired by picasa viewer.

Another solution would be to have a collection in as a video player feature(eg video collection).But that makes it dependent on the application and most people nowadays have videos, quite a lot on their hard disk, so I think it affects a large userbase.

And GNOME is kinda new to me(did some coding with GTk+ for simple apps ), so could someone point me in the right direction?