[Rhythmbox-devel] Video, Podcast, iPod, Light?

[John Richard Moser <nigelenki comcast net>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

I'm on Rhythmbox 0.9.2 and looking forward to 0.9.3, as I hear podcasts
work and there's been a UI redesign.  I'm also looking at iPod support
and video, and wondering what future directions Rhythmbox will take.  I
have a few ideas of my own on where this should go; I guess it doesn't
hurt to ask the dev team how likely it is to happen.

Consider these as suggestions, not feature requests; do what you want
with them, whether implementing them straight (as vague as a lot of this
intentionally is, that would be rather difficult) or coming up with a
better way to do the same thing.  Ignoring them is always an option as well.

==Video==
Video is my first concern.  Adding a video display area to Rhythmbox
would be potentially non-trivial.  I've been considering, and think it
may be feasible to black out the playlist area and plaster the video
over it; the playlist would appear when the mouse passes into it for a
second or two.  Aside from this, gstreamer video decoders and the
display pipeline would be used.

==Podcasting==
Rhythmbox apparently allows for the reading of podcasts.  This is
becoming a very popular media channel; full support for audio and video
podcasting should be supported.  Video podcasting obviously requires
video support.  Further, the handling of caching, updating, archiving,
and tracking podcasts needs to be considered; the user should be able to
specify the duration of a podcast archive, and also be able to play a
podcast he got partway through another session and have it pick up
exactly where it left off.

It may be possible to tap into Apple's free podcast directory in iTunes;
but that would likely be a lot of work (there's a side protocol to
handle, but I'm not sure if it's http or an actual mixed up protocol).
Some good method of locating podcasts would still be helpful, but not
essential.

It's also notable that podcasting is basically an abuse of RSS 2.0;
thus, although out of scope unless you deform "media" to include news
media, it would be relatively (in comparison) trivial to slightly modify
the podcast code to aggrigate RSS feeds.  Now, displaying them would
take some GUI work; considering this is out of scope, it's not likely
that this would become a feature of Rhythmbox unless some developer
really wants to start incorporating GtkHTML3.0

==iPod==
Rhythmbox 0.9.2 includes some iPod reading support, which is very nice.
 I've been having trouble making gtkpod handle podcasts and video; with
podcast support in Rhythmbox, handling of the iPod in a more complete
way would become an important consideration.  This would include not
only reading and adding music; but converting incompatible formats to
MP3/AAC or h.264 on transfer and (using mp3gain) normalizing tracks as
they're written to the iPod.

The iPod is a popular media device, and we don't want a deficiency for
popular media devices to exist in Linux, BSD, or other
not-Apple-or-Microsoft platforms; with gtkpod around, the argument goes
to the fact that the iPod by nature -NEEDS- to integrate with a central
media library, as it acts simply as a carry-off extension of that.  The
simple fact is that the iPod allows you to create a playlist of music
and videos, place it on the iPod, and then take it with you when you
leave your terminal; this is exactly the point where iPod meets Rhythmbox.

==Light==
Once video support is incorporated, the potential to use Rhythmbox as a
light, on-demand media player like Totem or Media Player (mplayer.exe
from Win95/3.1) becomes attractive.  This would allow Rhythmbox to play
music, movies, and streams ad-hoc without necessarily adding them to the
library or playlist; this becomes important when you're using a Web
browser to tell Rhythmbox to play something like a podcast or a video
off the net (which goes to /tmp or simply has the URI passed).

This could be incorporated before or after full Podcast (i.e. with
video) and iPod support would be added, if they were; but is pretty much
pointless if video support isn't added.  The basic point of this feature
would be to eliminate the need for stand-alone, ad-hoc players like
Totem that can't keep a library and multiple playlists.

==Other Toys==
Other toys that could come along would be iTunes/Rhapsodi/Napster
support; an embedded Web browser (wtf?  It's in Songbird, just because
they can); picture gallerying; built-in CD ripping; general
encoding/decoding; or a full media organizational library.  My thoughts
on thoseare mixed.

Doing what Songbird did and supporting iTunes, Rhapsodi, and/or Napster
would be a lot of work; but it would be useful.  As for actually doing
this, I say to definitely allow for it via plug-in if the chance arises
(i.e. look at all the stores you can find and see how you'd allow
implementation with a Gecko control via plug-in); but don't waste time
on it yourself unless you REALLY want to.  The reasoning here is that
these stores need integration into the core media management system
(which would be Rhythmbox, managing an audio/video library) to work at
peak efficiency; but it's not your job to track 100 moving targets.

An embedded Web browser is cute, but impractical.  It's doable (plaster
it over the playlist area or something), it's even negligibly useful
(grab a movie, sound, podcast, image, etc into your library); it's just
not in demand.  Firefox is there, why would you want to browse from your
music player too?  While we're at it, why not integrate with libgaim,
thunderbird, and gimp?  You get the idea.

A picture gallery would be menially useful.  If people actually DO keep
and organize pictures, then I guess it'd go well with Rhythmbox,
especially if you want to control the iPod as a major feature.  It's
probably trivial to implement, and if the chance arises you could go for
it; but in practice I doubt it's worth doing.  If you decide to do it,
just take comfort in the thought that there are a handfull of people out
there that you're making smile; everyone else is wishing you'd fix
podcasting or something.

Built-in CD ripping would be a great idea!  Pop in a CD, see it appear
like a playlist or iPod!  Select the tracks, drag to the library, and
watch it either A) ask you what to do; or B) auto-rip the CD to
configured specifications, giving proper file system placement, naming,
encoding format(s), encoding parameters, and tagging information from
the CDDB.

Full media organizational library would be great.  Organization like
{Video, Audio, Pictures} or {Artist, Album, Genre} is great, especially
in combination (video AND audio WHERE artist = foo AND genre = dance).
The classical tree view layout like Windows Media Player or WinAmp uses
is actually pretty nice.

Consider normalization at playback; gapless mode; crossfade;
normalization on the iPod (mp3gain); and other toys as nice, but
probably more aimed at a plug-in architecture (aside from normalization
on iPod, which would be iPod support).  Also consider that iPod support
can be flexible enough to regress to generic MP3 player support for MP3
players that are USB mass storage devices and only look for MP3 files on
the filesystem rather than other meta-data files like the ITunesDB.

- --
All content of all messages exchanged herein are left in the
Public Domain, unless otherwise explicitly stated.

    Creative brains are a valuable, limited resource. They shouldn't be
    wasted on re-inventing the wheel when there are so many fascinating
    new problems waiting out there.
                                                 -- Eric Steven Raymond
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFDs0j4hDd4aOud5P8RAiPUAJ0RihBt1pF/9z7JX4QQ8v94MF8vmwCfXZvQ
8rzHm5v5l55y12Y/wtT43T8=
=d3gk
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----