Plasma/Plasma Media Center: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 05:10, 8 February 2012

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

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)

Navigation within PMC

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

2011 [1] [2] [3] [4]

2010 [5] [6] [7]

2009 [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18]

@@ Line 102: / Line 102: @@
 === Status Reports ===
+'''2011''' [http://sinny.in/node/12] [http://sinny.in/node/13] [http://sinny.in/node/14] [http://sinny.in/node/15]
 '''2010''' [http://alediaferia.blogspot.com/2010/03/call-for-devs-part-i.html] [http://alediaferia.blogspot.com/2010/04/welcome-to-my-gsoc-student-personal.html] [http://blog.binarylooks.com/2010/05/plasma-media-center-status-report-and-introduction/]
 '''2009''' [http://alediaferia.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/smells-like-summer-of-code/] [http://alediaferia.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/adventures-in-mediacenter-land/] [http://alediaferia.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/get-your-cover/] [http://alediaferia.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/plasmatube/] [http://alediaferia.wordpress.com/2009/06/11/browsing-your-medias/] [http://alediaferia.wordpress.com/2009/06/17/rating-your-medias/] [http://alediaferia.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/media-center-quick-update/] [http://alediaferia.wordpress.com/2009/07/11/still-alive/] [http://alediaferia.wordpress.com/2009/08/08/mediacenter-again/] [http://alediaferia.blogspot.com/2009/08/gsoc-ends-mediacenter-continues.html] [http://alediaferia.blogspot.com/2009/09/plug-your-model-in-mediacenter.html]