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Christian F.K. Schaller | 14 Feb 2007 10:56

Re: Call for a Gnome Media Center

Well I am not sure how 'huge' this effort needs to be as we have a lot
of these places implicitly in place already. Everything uses GStreamer
which means a shared library and a lot of shared code already. A recent
example here is that I know both Rhythmbox and Exaile hackers are
working on adding Equalizer support, both helping out with and using a
new Equalizer plugin recently added to gst-plugins-bad CVS.

On top of that there is a lot of direct code sharing between the
projects, like Rhythmbox (and I think others) using Totems playlist
parser library as one example.

For UI conventions most of these apps tries hard to follow the GNOME UI
guidelines, but as I mentioned before I am not sure this is relevant for
Elisa as Elisa is a GUI targeted at use with a remote control, not a
mouse and keyboard, which makes 'desktop' UI conventions a bit off.

As for a shared database this might be a good idea, but I will leave
that up to application writers to decide, for me a good start would be
that all Music applications for instance tried hard to get people to
save their Music under $HOME/Music for instance. That way when you start
another Music application or Elisa you don't need to specify which
directory to look for Music inn. Similar conventions would be good for
pictures and movies and album/dvd cover art. 

Christian

On Tue, 2007-02-13 at 18:15 +0000, Alex Jones wrote:
> I think what is needed here is an (albeit huge) co-ordinated effort into
> some kind of GNOME Media system, where a video player (Totem) and a
> music jukebox (Rhythmbox) and a media centre (???) can share code,
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Christian F.K. Schaller | 14 Feb 2007 10:59

Re: Call for a Gnome Media Center

On Tue, 2007-02-13 at 15:39 -0500, Martin Meyer wrote:
> I for one would like to see a network file browser of some kind in any
> media center app. If I run this Gnome Media Center on an HTPC in my
> living room, I want to be able to access the media stored *anywhere*
> in my house. The majority of it is on my desktop, but when someone
> comes over with a Windows laptop and I want to play a video off it,
> I'm not going to want to open an SSH window and mount the share!

Well this is what systems such as upnp a/v and DAAP tries to accomplish.
Elisa already supports upnp a/v (which is the major standard used in the
Windows world and also among a lot of hardware makers) and Rhythmbox,
Banshee and more support DAAP. DAAP support in Elisa is planed and I am
trying to encourage the application makers to also support upnp a/v.

Christian

> I guess my main point is that not all video you want to play needs to
> be in your "Personal Media Database" thing, it could be anywhere. This
> volatile media doesn't need to remain present after it's played.
> 
> I know this is not really at the core of this discussion but I think
> it's an important consideration for such an application to be
> successful. If this is a real Gnome Media Center then Nautilus should
> be able to provide some assistance here, no? After all, totem and
> mplayer and xine all support playing directly from smb shares.
> 
> Martin Meyer
> 
> On 2/13/07, Alex Jones <alex <at> weej.com> wrote:
> > I think what is needed here is an (albeit huge) co-ordinated effort into
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Christian F.K. Schaller | 22 Feb 2007 13:28

New development releases of schrodinger and libtsmux

Hi,
We cut new development releases of the Schrodinger and libtsmux packages
today. We will try to make more frequent releases going forward as we
close in on the final remaining issues. 

This release is not yet 100% bitstream compliant as per the latest spec,
but we are getting there. Performance of the decoder is greatly improved
and the encoder while not yet creating production quality files is
producing usable files for testing. 

The GStreamer plugins are also improved and the playback plugin now
supports seeking for instance.

libtsmux has also had a new release mostly to make it conform to the
latest version of the Dirac in MPEG-TS specification. The new
specification is still not on the website due to Sourceforge shell
access being down, so interested parties should check out the libtsmux
SVN module to get the latest version of the spec.

You get the latest releases here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=155255

A screenshot showing totem playing a Dirac file generated with this
development snapshot can be seen here:
http://www.linuxrising.org/screenshots/diracanimemusic.png

More information on the Schroedinger project as always on:
http://schrodinger.sf.net

Christian
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