venerdì 21 agosto 2009

GSoC ends, MediaCenter continues...

As most of you may already know the firm pencils down date of the GSoC for this year was on Monday the 17th at the beginning of this week. So GSoC has come to his end also this year but as usual with KDE our projects will keep staying alive for long :). And this is the case also for the MediaCenter. But first of all I would like to say "thank you" to my friendly-always-ready-to-answer-my-questions Marco Martin a.k.a. notmart who has been so meaningful in helping me with my project.
[Edit: this is really the picture i wanted to show]

MediaCenter started has a playground for a series of components aimed at handling media contents on the desktop. It's still in its early phases of development but it already exposes a good API that allowed me to write this already-mostly-working implementation. The graphical aspect is maybe the least nice one since I still have to adapt everything to Nuno's mockup, but the core parts are already working as expected. I recently blogged about the mediacenter and not so much has changed visually but I've worked on fixing some really annoying issues. In addition to this i gave a first basic implementation of the keyboard navigation for the mediabrowser. Actually, as notmart made me notice, MediaCenter shouldn't be designed only to be installed on a PC but, mostly, it should be designed for being used on a TV. That's why having an applet mouse-dependent is not so nice for a TV MediaCenter :p.
Currently the mediabrowser is shown fullscreen when nothing is playing and i'll work on making it pluggable with different models as i probably announced in my last post. The use of plugins will allow developers to write their own model exploring a specific source of medias. I think i'll work on the YouTube model as I already wrote a youtube engine for it. This way the browser will allow the user to choose which model to use in the current session of the mediacenter, which is pretty nice imho :).

So, if it's still not so clear, i'll continue my contribution to the mediacenter as long as it will need love and i'm sure the Plasma Team will support me in this =).

But that's it for now, stay tuned people :)

2 commenti:

  1. Nice work on the mediacenter! I suppose you can already use nepomuk tags instead of folders there, right? Would make support for mp3 movies etc pretty easy... Please continue working on this, I'm looking forward to using it on my TV :D

    RispondiElimina
  2. This is already looking better then what I saw in previous blog post, I really will look foward to kde media center, because I have lots of media.

    I hope that in future its possible to use subs in Dragonplayer and this media center

    RispondiElimina