[vlc-devel] Qt4 open dialogs (again)

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

	Hello,

I don't recall coming to a conclusion as to what should be done with the 
multiple open dialogs. The current situation is a bit messy.

Disks
------
There are two ways to open disks:
- Media (menu), then Open disc, then Play.
- Devices (from playlist), then Discs, then the playlist item.

The good news is, both methods support streaming and transcoding. That said, 
it is a bit hard to find in both cases. With the open dialog you need to keep 
the Play button pressed and use the combo. With the playlist, you need to 
right click on the item.

However neither options are really good. On the one hand, the open dialog does 
not find the available discs and types automatically, so it requires manual 
setup from the user. On the other hand, the playlist item does not allow 
disabling menus or selecting specific titles/chapters.

Arguably though, disabling DVD menus and selecting titles are advanced 
features mostly of use for transcode & streaming. Afterall, the navigation 
menu is more convenient for normal playback. So it might make sense to move 
them to the streaming and transcoding wizard? But even then, what do we do of 
the menu item? Do we change it to show the disc SD in the playlist (on 
platforms that support this)? Ideally, the SD could perhaps be "embedded" in 
the dialog, but such implementation seems quite complicated to me.

A/V Capture
------------
From usability perspective, I think capture is a lot worse than disks. On the 
one hand, the dialog expects the user to know what audio and video device to 
open, which is really awful. On the other hand, the SD plugins can only 
provide pure audio or silent video, due to playlist design "limitations".

So it seems the only solution is to embed the SD's in the dialog, but I have 
no clue how to do that.

Screen capture
---------------
Not too bad, but the open dialog can only capture the whole desktop. If/when 
the SD gets XRR support, we can select individual displays or view ports, but 
again only from the playlist...

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net/
http://fi.linkedin.com/in/remidenis