Plasma/Plasma Media Center
This page describes the goals for Plasma Media Center (PMC), explains the design choices being made and details the outstanding tasks remaining.
Use Cases
Viewing Media On The Go With a Laptop
Joe is on a train / airplane travelling between two cities. The trip is long enough to watch the latest episode of his favourite T.V. show which he downloaded the night before from his PVR at home. Joe pops open his laptop, clicks on the Desktop Toolbox and selects "Media Center". PMC loads and he selects "Video", which presents a list of videos on his internal hard drive.
Viewing Media At Home, Laptop -> T.V.
Jane is at home and wants to show her dinner guests pictures from the recent weekend trip she went on. Jane plugs her laptop into the living room television, opens the application launcher (Kickoff, Lancelot) and selects "Media Center". PMC starts up and she selects "Photos" which shows various sets of photo albums. After going through the "Weekend Ski Trip" photos, she goes back and selects Videos -> Youtube and loads a Youtube playlist of top 40 music videos to play in the background while they visit.
A PVR Style Experience
Jaqueline sits down on the couch with her husband Jack and they turn on the television and their Plasma Media Center set top box. They grab the remote control and check the videos that they had recorded / downloaded but haven't watched yet. They select an episode of House and another of Fawlty Towers and press "Play".
Media Center for Plasma Active
Efforts are on to make PMC capable of playing media files on Plasma Active.
Design Decisions
Architecture
On a very high level, PMC is composed of QML components for different parts of the MediaCenter.
Components
- Media Browser
The media browser is an applet which is responsible in showing a UI to the user for browsing through her media items. The browser keeps track of the currently selected Mode in the MediaCenter Control dataengine and changes its backend accordingly.
- Media Infobar
The media infobar is a simple applet which shows information about the current media to the user.
- Media Player
This applet uses Phonon QML to play Audio/Video and show Images.
- Media Welcome
This applet hosts the home welcome screen which is presented to the user when PMC starts up.
Browsing Backends
Another very important component of PMC, browsing backends support PMC to have different sources for media to be used. Backends are plguins so one can, for example, write a plugin to show all images from a image sharing website
- Local files
This backend collection allows the user to browse her local filesystem for media. It exposes three backends-
- Local pictures
- Local music
- Local videos
- Metadata
This backend collection uses Plasma Active's metadata model to fetch media from Nepomuk. This should allow us to create groupings based on media tags (such as artist, album etc). Similar to local, this contains three backends-
- Metadata pictures
- Metadata music
- Metadata videos
Libs
This has core MediaCenter classes to help in functionality.
Shells
This has the actual PMC shell which loads the containment.
Mockups
Here are three early Mockups by Nuno Pinheiro (with permission). The top/bottom panel idea has been taken from here (higher resolutions of these on svn)
- Wiimote (thanks Sebastian for the initial work on this)
- Keyboard
- Mouse
- Touch
- Remote control
TODO
Support for playlist
Right now users can select a media and play it, however a playlist concept is missing
Accessibility
Make sure that the following input methods work-
- Keyboard
- Mouse
- Touch Gestures (pinch, swipe etc)
- TV Remote (wiimote etc)
Port dataengines (youtube, flickr etc) to new plugins architecture
hayri?
Support for grouping by tag, artists, album etc in Music Plugin
hayri?
Adding DVD/CD play support
In general add support for removable devices
Documentation
Visualizations for music
Current contributors
Marco Martin - notmart on freenode
Shantanu Tushar - Shaan7 on freenode
Sinny Kumari - ksinny on freenode
Past contributors
Christophe Olinger - binarylooks on freenode, olingerc on gitorious.org
Sebastian - sebas on freenode
Alessandro - alediaferia on freenode
Christopher Blauvelt - cblauvelt on freenode
Lukas Appelhans
Onur-Hayri Bakici
... add your name if you have contributed and its missing
Plasma Media Center IRC Channel on Freenode
- plasma-mediacenter on irc.freenode.net
Repository
Code is browsable at PMC @ kde websvn
Status Reports
2009 [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18]
Find the older design and discussions here /History