Amarok Blog

KDE Commits prempted me (which is fine of course! ), but here is the official announcement of a video player I'm calling Video Player. The all-important screenshot:

If your a Codeine user and it looks familiar, thats the idea. Codeine is the "usability focus, simple video player" that Max Howell (of Amarok and Filelight fame) developed using KDE3 and xine-lib. What usability-focused means in this case is that menus have a limited number of options and that its simple to perform common tasks. This philosophy works really well for a video player. The first dialog pops up with the list of videos you watched. Select it and it remembers where you were in the movie, what size it was at etc. In other words, it keeps state. The (really fairly obvious, but somehow often missing) feature of remembering where I left off in a video was the killer feature of Codeine for me.



So I asked Max a couple of weeks ago if I could port Codeine to KDE4 and Phonon, and effectively become its maintainer. He was happy to see it continue on and has been helping explain some of its mysteries. The name Video Player is actually Max's idea... its simplicity appeals to me but its ungooglable so I'm not entirely wed to that name.



The port to KDE4 is going smoothly. It helped that Max made extensive use of actions, since Qt4 is more QAction-oriented. Max's style of avoiding pretty much any "copy and paste coding" (using helper functions and #define's) made porting easier as well.



Another advantage is that Phonon is really just a good API, and is spectacular compared to other multimedia APIs I've seen. I got it to the point where it showed just the first frame of video in Xine. After stripping Codeine of its Xine dependency, I looked at the Kaffeine4 code. Kaffeine4 is currently small and tutorial-sized so it was quite helpful. Adding Phonon support was quick work - it now plays video and everything. I've just been doing detail work since then.



And big thanks goes to Seb Ruiz for getting Video Player to actually link! Christoph Pfister has been helpful as I get into some Phonon development (as well as writing the aforementioned Kaffeine4).



There's still much work to be done, though I suspect its mostly in the Phonon and its engines.