[vlc-devel] VLC MiniMode Widget: SVG/CSS based Media Playback Notification and Controller

[Rohit Yadav]

Greetings all!

I'm Rohit Yadav, 2rd year computer science and engineering student from
Institute of Technology, India. I like to play flute and develop open source
applications.

I'm new to VLC and inexperienced so you may find bugs and coding style
errors in the patch, though I tried to review it as much as possible.

I just finished coding this widget for VLC, I call* VLC MiniMode* widget
which is an alternative media notification and a simple playback controller
based on SVGs and CSS.
A prototype of the widget was made as a GSoC qualification task (more on my
blog). Though, I was *not* selected for GSoC for VLC, I thought it was a
good idea to complete the widget.

The widget is completed now by yours truly (thank you :)
Code for drag and drop was copied, rest is my original work incl. SVGs and
CSS.
Special thanks to *J-B* for his suggestions and reviews.

(I have also started this wiki thread to create a roadmap for development of
such widget for VLC: http://wiki.videolan.org/VLC_Widget_Project )

*Please review the code and give feedback.* I'm also sending few
screenshots.
(I don't know how people give versions so I'm going to give it v0.1 :)

Release notes MiniMode v0.1
======================
+ Displays Meta Data: Title, Artist, Album
+ AlbumArt now works #yay
+ Playback Controls (Play, Pause, Next, Previous) totally working.
+ UI elements: play/pause, slider synchronised with IM
+ Drag and Drop files to play
+ Playback Slider Added
+ Volume Control Added
+ Default SVG based theme "Dark Pepper"
+ Widget Lock/Unlock Feature [To lock the visibility of widget]
+ Widget, starts on Top-Right, can be dragged across the desktop like
Fullscreen Controller
+ A small hidden hacks [ Find it out, it's easy ;-) ]
- The original prototype, had shuffle and repeat options, were removed to
make a sober UI
- The idea of including a Video display was dropped because of expected VLC
crashes and CPU load.
- Widget is made using SVGs, hence can be made resize-able but it's not
required.

Known Issues
==========
- Tested on Ubuntu 9.04, testing required for windows
- Sometimes album art updates but Meta Data fails to be loaded and updates
when played again.
- In case, no album art if found a default monochrome VLC logo is shown.
- When widget is dragged too fast, the motion is not smooth.

Future Plans
=========
+ After reviews, the widget prefs. to show/add when VLC starts is to be
added in the preferences UI.
+ More SVG based themes can be designed, like Firefox Personas, by adding a
preferences option for MiniMode theme using CSS etc.

Thanks a lot for going through this long email :)

Regards,
Rohit Yadav
"The geek says signing in and signing out!"
http://rohityadav.wordpress.com
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