For those who keep track of the mailing list you know there has been a lot of talk about video in amaroK. The idea has been tossed around before, and the nmm engine even does video, at least I think it still does. Anyway I spent some time thinking about the idea and some of the possible problems.
First would be that tagging of videos really doesn't exist. This is a big problem, without tags you lose most of the features that make amaroK what it is. If the media is not in the collection you are left with pretty much just a playlist, something easily implemented in existing video players. Currently to get media into the collection you need tags, this problem is well known to those who try to add wma's to there collection. So where does this leave us? Do we adjust the db to suit the needs of video, or should someone write plugins for taglib 1.4 to support video?
Second, where do we put the interface for accessing videos? Using the file browser would not be very good, and would be inconsistent with normal media handling in amaroK. Generally media is accessed with the collection browser or some other part that requires the collection, such as the context browser. This brings us back to problem one.
Another issue is bloat. Many have said keep it simple, but what is simple. Is it open a little window that shows the video and that's it? If this is what it means, I'm still at a loss to find any advantage to playing video in amaroK. There are plenty of minimalistic video players, one of which is by our very own (gone missing) mxcl, and it does the job nicely.
And if video support is added, does it stop there. Should we go so far as to integrate K3B for burning, there is already a wish item to add a K3B part into amaroK. And what about the bit torrent client, maybe it should be next. I don't think the idea of an amaroK Media Desktop Environment is that great, as too many features can confuse and scare away new users, and just hiding them makes for poor usability.
Maybe people can share there ideas and solutions as just throwing in a feature like this would be bad, and careful planning is needed to keep from ending up with an interface that's bloated and a pain to use.
