Solid Magic and the Dragon Player Release Candidate

Release Candidate

I just released the Dragon Player release candidate. It really is the release candidate, it works just fine as far as I know. But I'm not foolish, it probably has some problems that only a wider release will discover. The only identified problems so far is that I forgot to bump the version and the README still calls it "Video Player." I used Harald Sitter's Amarok (but very generic) release script, I was able to include i18n in this release for the first time. There's about 20 translations, which surprised me. Thanks to all the translators! I plan on the 2.0 final version to being out soon, certainly before Hardy feature freezes in mid-February.

Solid Magic

One of the nifty additions in this release is that the "Play Disc" button is now smarter then just playing the DVD at /dev/dvd. Using the KDE pillar Solid, it gets a list of all optical media. If there's more then one, it gives the user a little select menu. The main issue this addresses is that some users have more then one DVD drive. Now they can put the DVD in either and Dragon Player will play it. Also there is no longer a need for separate "Play VCD" and "Play DVD" buttons like Codeine had, since Solid identifies the type of disc.



The Solid API takes a little bit to get used to, but it actually makes a lot of sense. You ask Solid for a list of Solid::Device's. Device has a template as() method, that actually returns pretty much any of the other relevant Solid classes. So in my case, I use Solid::OpticalDisc to identify whether its a DVD, audio CD or VCD or just data and then Solid::Block to get the device path (eg /dev/hdc) to give to Phonon.