Re: Multimedia widgets in GTK+?

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Thu, 2007-03-01 at 11:06 -0800, Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
> On Thu, 01 Mar 2007 18:29:50 +0000 Bastien Nocera wrote:
> 
> >Heya,
> >
> >There are a few widgets in use in multimedia applications. The first
> >one is:
> >- BaconVolumeWidget, living in the libbacon module in SVN. It's
> >currently used by a large number of applications, cut'n'pasted (Totem,
> >Rhythmbox, LastExit, Banshee, Muine, Sound-Juicer, possibly others).
> 
> I feel like this is a bit special-purpose and heavy for a GUI toolkit,
> no?  What kind of dependencies would it add to gtk?  Obviously the
> widget isn't very useful without an A/V framework backend, and I
> wouldn't want to see gtk depend on gstreamer, xine-lib, etc.
> 
> Or maybe it could be done similar to theme engines or file system
> backends: let A/V backends be installable separately without being a
> hard dependency of gtk (obviously the video widget wouldn't do
> much/anything without a backend installed).

It doesn't depend on any A/V framework.  I'm not sure what's heavy duty
about:
$ wc -l bacon-volume.[ch]
  846 bacon-volume.c
   57 bacon-volume.h
  903 total

900 lines of code.

> >- HildonSeekbar[1], which would need quite a bit of reworking to be
> >added to GTK+. The main differences with the default GtkScale widgets
> >is that clicking on the through would seek directly to the place
> >clicked, not progressively get closer to the point clicked.
> 
> Can this be implemented in GtkScale as extra API instead of adding a
> new widget?

No, it requires changes to GtkRange as well, and one thing that was made
clear last I talked about this type of widget is that it should look
different from the existing GtkScale widgets.

> >The other
> >difference is the ability to mark a "fraction", ie. the amount of data
> >already downloaded, and available for seeking. I can see Rhythmbox,
> >Totem, Banshee, and any other apps dealing with streaming media using
> >it.
> 
> You mean sorta how YouTube does the seek bar with the little red
> indicator that moves to the right as more data gets downloaded?  Yeah,
> that could be pretty useful, maybe in things other than multimedia
> apps.  But again, could this be implemented via extra API in an
> existing widget?

Yes and no. It also needs to be implemented in the Scale widget.

-- 
Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>