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.

Release Info

Plasma Media Center 1.0.0 release

Plasma Media Center first stable release has been made recently on 20th March 2013.

KDE Dot article link : http://dot.kde.org/2013/03/20/plasma-media-center-release-one

Release and Feature Plan

Plasma Media Center 1.1

http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Plasma_Media_Center/Release_1.1

Plasma Media Center 1.2

http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Plasma_Media_Center/Release_1.2

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

PMC now works well with Plama Active. Small video showing PMC running on ExoPC at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8yV2NKiADM .

Design Decisions

Architecture

On a very high level, PMC is composed of QML components for different parts of the MediaCenter.

Media Elements

Media Welcome

It is a QML componnet which hosts the welcome screen which is presented to the user when PMC starts up.

Media Browser

It is a QML component which allows user to browse through the media from a backend and to select the desired media to play or view.

Media Player

It is a QML component that uses Phonon QML to play Audio/Video and show Images.

Media Controller

It is QML component that allows user to control currently playing media status like play/pause, seek, volume.

RuntimeData

It is a QML component which handles various media information that is needed when PMC is running.

Playlist

It is a QML component which contains list of media (Music and Videos) files added by user. User can add or remove media anytime from it.

ImageViewer

It is a QML component which is responsible to display picture in PMC. It contains pictureStrip component too, which display all available pictures of a directory in the form of strip and provides flexibility to view next, previous and any random selected picture from strip.

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

Online Services

This backend collection fetches media from Internet. Currently available backends are-

- Flickr : This backend fetches images related to the given search string from flickr.
- Picasa : This backend needs user to enter his/her Google login credential to browse through Albums and Pictures

Libs

It contains core MediaCenter classes to help in functionality.

Shells

This has the actual PMC shell which loads all the components and specifies the positioning of different components within shell. It also provides interconnection between various components.

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)