Always Look Ahead........
Current Status of Plasma Media Center
- planetkde |
- kde |
- mediacenter
Hi to all !
Happy to tell that Plasma Media Center has been improved a lot and have basic functionalities which is required in a mediacenter i.e Picture, Music and Video.
First of all when user open MediaCenter then welcome screen gets opened in full-screen (required) modes i.e picture, Music and Video. User can enter into any of these mode by clicking on the icons.
Screenshot of welcome screen is: https://picasaweb.google.com/117964207644299576171/PlasmaMediaCenter#5644467822839619490
Suppose, User clicks on MusicBrowsing, now user can browse through his local filesystem and can play the selected song he wants and can continue browsing by using back button which is at top-left side of screen. At the bottom, in mediaInfoBar applet remaining time of media getting played is displayed.
Screenshot of MusicBrowsing mode is: https://picasaweb.google.com/117964207644299576171/PlasmaMediaCenter#5644470867992909474
Suppose user wants to switch to other mode, then he press back button and reaches back to its home directory. Now after pressing again back button, will reach back to home screen and switches to PictureBrowsing mode. Here, he can browse through the local filesystem and can view the Picture. Directory containig picture will show thumbnail of picture. User can view the picture by clicking on the picture.
Screenshot of pictureBrowsing mode is: https://picasaweb.google.com/117964207644299576171/PlasmaMediaCenter#5644471577920151122
and https://picasaweb.google.com/117964207644299576171/PlasmaMediaCenter#5644471890815923730
User can also switch to videoBrowsing mode where he can watch the video he wanted to see in full screen mode.
Screenshot of Video getting played in Plasma Media Center: https://picasaweb.google.com/117964207644299576171/PlasmaMediaCenter#5644475723911097746
These are the basic features which has been implemented yet. It still need a lot of improvement to make it more usable and beautiful.
Wiki page of mediacenter has been updated which is present at http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Plasma/Plasma_Media_Center . It will help people to start contributing in Plamsa Media Center.
To make Plasma Media Center even better, we need your suggestion too. Comment will be really useful 
Thanks
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Comments
Don't reinvent the Wheel... something exciting exists already.
Hello,
I really enjoy that there is a project to get a Media Center for KDE. Thank you guys for your work.
But, to be honest I think you spend too much time on this project, when there is already a nice project that could allow you to jump forward !
I heard about Plasma Mediacenter project almost 2 years before, and what is already done ?
The screenshots we can see on this post question me ! Do they really fit our very good looking plasma KDE desktop ? Obviously not. It looks like a big wallpaper with some enormous icons. We are waiting for something easy to use, configurable and of course, beautiful.
I mentioned a nice project, I thought about QT Media Hub. It is an Open Source Project hosted by code.google.com. It is looking like XBMC, based on QML, and it works already very well.
I suggest you to take a look at this video :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZXV4J0d_nE
I think, Plasma-Mediacenter developpers should better base their work on QT Media Hub, adapting it to fit perfectly KDE.
Other developpers did it in the past. Rekonq (KDE network browser) developpers did a great job. They first based their work on the Arora browser (again a QT Open source project), but they made it KDE specific (KDE libs).
Again, I don't want to hurt developpers here, everybody should notice the benefits : developpers by saving time, KDE users by enjoying a nice mediacenter as soon as possible.
Thank you.
Design proposel
I think the design is still not very usable even if you did a lot of work codewise (so underneath).
I created 2 mockups which in my opinion look way better than the actual design. If you wish you can modify my design and try to make it better.
It would be nice to have a good looking Plasma Media Center
http://www.abload.de/img/media-center-main-menugudi.png
http://www.abload.de/img/media-center-play-musiq7go.png
Did you look at the mockups
Did you look at the mockups on techbase? I think that it gives good image what media center should look like, even though it could be better. As PCM is based on Plasma and QML the desingers have nearly no limits... or so have I heard.
Design proposel
I think the design is still not very usable even if you did a lot of work codewise (so underneath).
I created 2 mockups which in my opinion look way better than the actual design. If you wish you can modify my design and try to make it better.
It would be nice to have a good looking Plasma Media Center
Local?
I think it shouldn't say "local this", "local that". Sounds very technical, while media center should be in my opinion as casual as possible. Thanks for the efforts.
Cheers
Bangarang is better. I think.
Bangarang is better. I think.
Bangarang isn't a media
Bangarang isn't a media center? And as far as git commits go, it seems it's dead which hopefully isn't true though. There are very few media centers for linux and probably the most notable is XMBC but even comparing these two is kinda unfair as PMC obviosly isn't ready in any meaning of the word.
how to install?
totally clueless
Hi!
You can download the source code by doing git clone from https://projects.kde.org/projects/playground/multimedia/plasma-mediacenter/repository and then try to install it in your kde-trunk.
Requirements
Hi. What are the requirements to install the mediacenter? I just checked out master and installed to /usr/local but some componnents do not seem to be picked up. Anyway, thanks for your eforts. Keep up with the good work. Luis
Hi!
Try running kbuildsycoca4 too, it may work and yes for for video and Music phonon and phonon-gstreamer will be required.
Thanks! That helped. But I
Thanks! That helped. But I had to install to /usr to get things picked up by kbuildsycoca4. Maybe some environment variable I am setting wrong. As for phonon I get an error message saying that "module 'Phonon' is not installed". Is this because I am running 4.7.0 instead of master? I searched in kubuntu's repos but there doesn's seem to be any qml or declarative module regarding phonon there. Anyway, thanks for your efort. I will be giving this a try in a couple of weeks.
export
export KDEDIRS=/usr/local:$KDEDIRS
sudo kbuildsycoca4 --global --noincremental
kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental
plasma-mediacenter
Both kbuildsycoca4 runs might not be necessary, but this always walks for me.