Re: suggestion: unified media player control panel applet

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Tue, 2005-09-13 at 10:02 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-09-13 at 17:10 +0100, Bill Haneman wrote:
> > John Palmieri wrote:
> > 
> > >...People will ask why is my favorite xyz
> > >multimedia app not an option.  I think it comes down to select one media
> > >player and use that.  If it is not good enough to do everything you need
> > >then that should be fixed - not the applet/notification icon. 
> > 
> > This seems wildly unlikely, thinking historically.  I am far from convinced 
> > that one app to play them all is even a good fit for user needs in all 
> > situations.  It's a nice goal, but IMO we shouldn't be making desktop-wide 
> > design decisions based on this premise.  There are just too many reasons 
> > why people both want and need multiple media players on their desktops.
> 
> Practically speaking, I think Bill is right. The applet I'm proposing
> shouldn't take more than a couple of days to code and have working and
> useful for the next GNOME unstable release. Writing the One Media Player
> That Everyone Wants To Use For Everything is going to take a lot longer
> than that. Heck, there's currently only one GNOME media player that I
> know of which will both act as a library-based audio player and also
> play CDs, and that's Banshee, which is very new, based on Mono and has
> dependencies many distros don't yet meet. And besides, it doesn't play
> video. Right now I use sound-juicer to play/rip CDs, Muine to play audio
> files, and Totem to play videos; it'll be a while before there's an app
> I'm comfortable using to replace all three, I think. And that's just me,
> who likes modern apps and doesn't mind using mono. There's plenty of
> people out there who still use xmms (and yes, a panel applet could
> support xmms; xmms has console remote-control commands).
> 
> If, one day, we have the One True Media Player, it can have its own
> panel applet and we can happily throw this thing in the trashcan. In the
> meantime, I still think it'll be useful...

You've been looking too long at what Microsoft does. A useful movie
player has a very different layout and features from a useful music
player.

CD support (reading and ripping) in Rhythmbox is being worked on.
Something like Totem will never be as good as Rhythmbox to play music,
and I hope no one hopes to get video playback in Rhythmbox ;)

---
Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net> 
"Anybody who can do anything in Leicester but make a jumper has got to
be a genius" - Brian Clough's tribute to Martin O'Neill, who used to
manage Leicester City.