Karl Lattimer
Sun, 04 Jan 2009 04:39:34 -0800
I've been lurking around a while and not doing much, I'm only just managing to get entertainer working, after graphics card glitches and all kinds of crud... anyway, it is for the most part working well now.
I've only started getting to see the future plans of the project coming to light, and would like to know more about your plans for DVB support. I've been considering drawing up some interesting UI ideas for a EPG and OSD for television which would work well in clutter, now one of the big questions is how are the UI themes constructed? A few years ago on the freevo project we were discussing having XML theme templates which used python code embedded or linked as scripts to the XML in much the same way HTML and javascript are used. This would allow us to have some fairly cool animations built into the themes rather than built into the application. I really need to do some drawings and concept designs up to show you some of the things I've been considering of course I'd like to know what the scope of the theme engine is and where the boundaries lie between the applications UI features and the theme engines. Some other things of note I'd like to mention; The current status of the TV/Movie lookup's doesn't seem to take folders into account. For instance, I store my TV Shows in folders like this; Show Name/Season/Episode no. Episode Title.filetype It would be interesting if you could associate tags like "show", "season", "episode", "movie", "collection" etc... to folders, files. This kind of thing could be done with tracker, and entertainer-backend could feed more detailed metadata back into tracker, then utilise tracker data to build the UI. As I understand it, tracker now has some support in there for inserting raw RDF data and building semantic relationships too, so there's a world of metadata that can be used and also improved upon with entertainer. Of course it would be even cooler if entertainer could automatically figure out whether or not a folder's name was relevant to it being a show or a season with it's parent being a show, or a "Show Season X" naming etc... There are a bunch of things that keep me using freevo for the moment. First off is entertainer doesn't autojoin files together. So if i have "Movie part 1" and "Movie part 2" I don't get those joined into "Movie", it would be awesome if you could achieve gapless playback, but I'm not sure if this is at all possible with gstreamer... I hope it is :) Remote control support seems to be a bit erm, undocumented or nonexistent? This should be fairly easy with pylirc, freevo uses it and it's a pretty good api, is there any existing implementation? Re-encoding, Recording, DVB-T/S, a webserver, a streaming server, recording server, tv-timeshifting all need to be there too :) I'd be happy to get involved with some of this stuff when I find the spare time, probably looking to hook it up with totem-dvb and the general gnome-dvb stuff that's been going on. I'd love entertainer to become as well connected to GNOME as frontrow is to OSX, reading my banshee or rhythmbox playlists and things in too, sharing metadata back and forth between applications and trackers metadata store. I'd also like to see the UI as pluggable as freevo is. I can have all my snes games, playstation games and other emulators and some native games all in one interface and link them up nicely-ish into the menus. Things which are great toys that would be nice to have for me include a youtube browser, an apple trailers browser an animated weather map (possibly taken from sites like the BBC :), a BBC iplayer plugin which could use webkit to navigate the website and manipulate the site etc... I could go on and on and on... I have lots of ideas about entertainer, I simply want it to work that way now :D Look forward to some detailed replied :) BR, K _______________________________________________ Entertainer-dev mailing list Entertainer-dev@lists.ironlionsoftware.com http://lists.ironlionsoftware.com/listinfo.cgi/entertainer-dev-ironlionsoftware.com