Re: Audio/Video file preview using gstreamer

["Erik Andrén" <erik andren gmail com>]

2007/9/26, Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>:

On Mon, 2007-09-24 at 00:12 +0200, Christian Neumair wrote:
> Am Sonntag, den 23.09.2007, 22:18 +0200 schrieb Erik Andrén:
> > I'm interested in playing with it and investigate the possibilites of
> > a
> > implementing a video preview-feature.
>
> Thanks for your interest!
>
> There are discussions on the bugzilla and maybe on the list (archived)
> where general metadata preview is discussed in a key-value based
> fashion, in a tooltip. It would also display image and video metadata,
> and a large preview for them.
>
> At the moment I can't point out any URIs, though.
>
> IIRC Alex didn't really like the concept, we should first sort out
> whether this has any chance of being integrated into Nautilus.

Yes. Tooltips suck. They keep getting in your way when you don't want
them. However, something like the metadata tiles by Neil Patel[1] seems
like a good approach. In fact, we discussed possible code design
approaches for a generalization of this. Nothing has came out of it yet
though.

Various plugins etc could generate metadata for display in it, and the
preview part could have a button to preview video or audio. (Of course,
I still think its a bad idea to run gstreamer in the nautilus process,
but that is easy to fix with some fork() and window cross-process
sharing action.)

But is a metadata window really necessary for this kind of a feature?
My idea is just that if you move your mouse over a video it starts to play at the exact location as the thumbnail, with the same resolution.
When the mouse leaves, the original thumbnail restores itself.
Additionally, with the help of gstreamer, both audio and video playback could share much of the same codebase.

[1] http://njpatel.blogspot.com/2007/02/nautilus-love.html