[vlc-devel] Qt media browser (playlist selector) reorganisation

[Jakob Leben]

Hi!

I am working on reorganisation of Qt playlist selector (I would prefer to
call it media browser). Here are my ideas about it and the questions that
are bugging me:

1.The media browser should abstract from services discover, meaning
- we don't need a common SD top node with particular SDs as children
- SDs should be distributed logically into categories that don't necessarily
map to individual SDs.

2.There is specific SDs which have configurable "entry points" (for example
Podcast SD - the entry points are user configurable podcast feeds).
- In this case there should be a media browser category which has right next
to its name a "+" button which spawns a dialog for user to configure and add
a new "entry point"
- the configurable entry points spawn as the children of that category. They
have right next to them a "-" button which removes the entry point.


Problems and questions, remarks:
1. In my opinion Media dirs should be configurable as well. If there is no
configuration saved, then we can use the current logic and just insert the
system dirs for Videos, Pictures and Music. But user should be able to
remove those or add as many arbitrary folders as he whishes. We could think
of making the media dirs SD monitor the changes to those folders in real
time (could the udev plugin provide that?).

2. Are UPnP, MTP, Bonjour and similar necessarily separate categories? I
don't have resources to test what they really do (none of my devices spawns
from those SDs), but I think they denote rather a method of inquiry for
media item places, not distinct types of media item places which user should
ever need to know about. So I propose to abstract from those modules and put
all the items they spawn together under one category ("Devices" or similar).
Does that make sense?

3. What do we do with shoutcast (an opinion
here<http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/vlc-devel/2009-October/068218.html>)?
Plus, why are Freebox TV and "French TV" spawned by shoutcast SD plugin at
all? Of course they are streaming media, but I believe they have nothing in
common with shoutcast? Am I wrong?


Anyway, the Qt side of implementation is going well, I have the
aforementioned embedded add/remove buttons working in my repo (for the
Podcast SD which supports configuration), we just need to think about the
above dilemmas and inject a little support for this project from plugins'
side.

Best regards,
Jakob
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