Comments on: Media at your fingertips

By: calum

calum — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:13:59 +0000

AIUI, the file selector provides all the hooks for doing image previews, but it’s up to individual apps to decide whether or not to use them… could be wrong though…

By: Rehdon

Rehdon — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 18:55:50 +0000

An image preview in the file selector would be a good start …

Rehdon

By: Patrys

Patrys — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 10:44:03 +0000

Ah, a centralised media library with an API… and a simple DAAP/UPnP sharing server using the library. One day it could be possible to actually use my PS3 to watch movies over wifi.

By: calum

calum — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:51:22 +0000

So, a few things to address here….

First off, I think assuming the user wants to store all their pictures in XDG_PICTURES_DIR, music in XDG_MUSIC_DIR etc. is *way* too short-sighted. Apple certainly don’t do that, you can store your music and photos anywhere, scattered all over your disk if you so desire, and iTunes, iPhoto etc. will manage them just fine whilst leaving them right where you put them. Even if you move them around outside of those applications later (although that part’s just down to HFS+).

Also, I’d like to be able to pull in my media from web services like Flickr etc., all from the same media browsing UI. The OS X UI doesn’t currently allow this AFAIK, but I’d guess it at least does its best to pull in any media you’ve stored on your .Mac account, if you have one. (Which I don’t.)

As for using metadata searches to find and present your media files… hmm, yeah, maybe one day, but I’ve never seen it work well enough yet– it’s perfectly possible on OS X too, but metadata maintenance on a huge media library is just far too arduous a task. So right now I’d still rather organise my stuff into folders/albums/playlists manually, and use a GUI that presents me with that hierarchy when I want to find it again later.

By: Frej Soya

Frej Soya — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:03:50 +0000

We have the location of the data allready from the XDG folders spec (XDG_PICTURES_DIR XDG_MUSIC_DIR…. etc). It should be possible to special case them from just this spec instead of creating “simple bookmarks” combined with bastian’s stuff above. We “just” need the intelligant browsing/viewing

Somewhat related – I tried making pictures from cheese findable in nautilus(and filepicker) – but sadly I got a WONTFIX. http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509475. Not trying to flame the maintainer, it is me that has failed to explain the problem

By: troll

troll — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 20:42:05 +0000

Media libraries would be nice. Perhaps after having that spec someone would create the first ever Linux based desktop media player application!

By: calum

calum — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 20:29:14 +0000

That would doubtless help a bit, but I suspect there’s a bit more to doing it well.

While it’s nice to know it’s there, personally I don’t think I’ve ever used the feature in the OS X file dialog, because in most applications you never have to go as far as the file dialog to find your media. And in OS X it’s also possible to use saved search folders in the file manager as the entry points to your media library if you want to, but the in-app media browser has evolved as the standard way of doing this instead.

I’m a bit too frazzled just now to think about the pros and cons of each approach though… maybe later

By: Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen

Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 20:07:50 +0000

Did anyone say “standardized searchable interface”? Did I say “simple”? Define a dbus object at some location and make it expose a Xesam[1] service – or even simpler; use the standard Xesam indexer to search out all media files.

Now if only the Xesam team could stand up and roll 1.0, and I could find the time to finish up xesam-glib, all would be downill from there.

[1]: xesam.org

By: Maxo

Maxo — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 19:48:30 +0000

I agree. Just like how there are is the Tango way of doing things to make graphics cohesive across applications, other things could be defined better for Gnome apps to make everything snap together a little better.
I think we should keep the lego-ness that gives Linux and advantage over BSD, but with well defined, and agreed upon, specifications to get a little more of that BSD-goodness going on.
I sure hop that makes sense.

By: Jakub Steiner

Jakub Steiner — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 19:12:58 +0000

Tree like shortcuts sounds like plugging a rectangular filter into the round opening in apollo 13. It would be better for GNOME to decide on common storage for Photos, Videos, Music…