Wednesday, May 28. 2008Amarok 2 Gets Music Video Support!
Heya,
over the last few days I've been working on a video applet for Amarok 2, allowing you to view music videos directly in Amarok's new context view. Here comes the screenshot:  As you can see, the video is nicely integrated in our user interface, thanks to Plasma magic. This feature is especially handy for watching Youtube videos, and we're working on integrating it directly with our SeeqPod service, allowing to find and play videos from the net in the blink of an eye. I'd like to stress though that this feature is strictly meant for watching music videos. We do not intend to turn Amarok 2 into a generic movie player! There won't be advanced features like full screen mode or DVD playback. So don't even try to convince us, I can assure you it's futile :p So, Amarok 2 is and will stay a music player (and a very good one, we hope), but the addition of playing music videos complements our feature set nicely. Last not least I should mention that this feature is completely optional; you can enable and disable each applet separately. Enjoy  Trackbacks
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I LOVE this! Video in Amarok is that I always wanted. Could be please Youtube videos included?
 Keep up great work.
Yep, as I wrote (RTFA dude;), Youtube playback is one of the intended applications for this feature.
Wow, I have accidentaly skipped whole paragraph while reading
What a day!?
As he wrote it can be done.
Though one can imagine integration like dropping a Youtube html url in the playlist and having the video automatically parsed out. And then only display the video without the flash player controls in the widget and hand control over to the Amarok progress and volume bar and player controls.. And a youtube search service/widget for finding new music videos..
Very nice!
I have really missed the feature in amarok to view video-podcasts.
You guys are getting too good!.....
Donīt think the iTunes team are not watching.... they are..... next stop.... multi-touch
Thanks dude for totally ruining my day! That screenshot with Christina's eyes totally has me mesmerized. I am not working now for the rest of the day, I am looking for her "Beautiful" video now
Great work on this!
Heh, that was my intention all along, by choosing a sexy woman for this screenshot. Xtina sure did the job
I thought you said a sexy woman? I don't see any sexy women in that screenshot, I only see Christina Aguilara.
Good work anyway! Does this also mean we'll eventually be able to transcode video for MP3 players from within Amarok?
Fullscreen videos is not an option, actually. It's a must have. If you don't implement it, why bother with video support at all? I mean, who would watch stamp-sized moving pictures when even youtube features fullscreen?
sigh
DVD playback, don't. Fullscreen videos, please, do it if you can. I love to watch my music videos in a size bigger than a stamp.
i think you full screen is very important. e.g. it will be very cool at a party
Exactly my idea too. Amarok is really useful to find the right music. So using it to be a video-DJ could be really nice. Amarok's media library is a powerful backend.
I'd love to display clips full screen and zap through them.
I love the approach of only showing music videos. But fullscreen support should be available... even iTunes has it. I just love to watch videos full screen, no matter what kind of them.
I'm wondering: can we modify the layout of Amarok 2? Because I really prefer the old layout with control button at the bottom.
Why not fullscreen? And how will you know if a video is a music video or not? Why can't it just play a video, and let us decide how we want to see it? Banshee already does this.
Excellent! Keep up the nice work!
I am actually watching an mp4 from youtube right now in Amarok2. However, may I suggest something? If it is feasible, you could read the tags of the currently playing song, run a search through youtube and display the appropriate video (or better display the yt search results and choose). You could take a look at clive and the totem player's youtube plugin. @anon I believe this amarok/plasma applet is using phonon, not that damn flash player, so hurray!
the tag idea could just be implemented in a plasmoid, couldn't it?
also, since phonon is just abstraction isn't it very well one of the back-ends could have a FLV codec?
#14: yes!! that would be awesome if amarok could search for the current song's video on youtube and play it at the same time. perhaps with an option to pre-load the next song's video so it starts out right away instead of wasting time fetching it when the song's loaded.
That's cool. But please think about fullscreen support again, as i will use another player to view my musicvideos then
FYI, there are also music DVDs, e.g. recordings of concerts.
I think this is great! I don't need fullscreen support, I can use standalone videoplayers for that. But simple youtube video playback, that doesn't get in the way, is really cool.
I recently went to a party, where the host had mostly crappy music on her pc. So I ended up dj'ing with a webbrowser, thanks to youtube. But having different videos in different tabs and starting/stopping them at the right time wasn't that easy (especially when you're drunk). The ability to add youtube-videos to the playlist, just like any other file, would be a dream for such situations. Thumps up!
I think most people don't really want Amarok to be a full blown video player with all features you'd epect from such an app. However, nobody really likes to watch movies in a crumbled little windows. Therefore doubleclicking on the video window in Amarok should make it fullscreen and pressing ESC should minimize it back...
That's common sense and not too much to ask for...
I agree to limit it to music videos only, but please support fullscreen! Make it an option if you like. I am sure Plasma supports this. So why lock this feature artificially down?!
What I would love is that Amarok gets the videos for your mp3 Playlist automatically (just like covers or lyrics) and display them like in amarokfs. (Picking up the party idea from Sepp)
Great!!!
Thatīs exactly what I had imagened in a mokup on kde-look.org one month ago. Really great work, and thanks to the one whoīs implementing this, but can you include a fullscreenmode just for me? 
Cool.
By 'applet' do you mean 'plasmoid' or is an applet a different thing? If a plasmoid, is it a lightweight 'container' which uses phonon to do all the video decoding/displaying work? And could this plasmoid be placed whereever I want, e.g. in a panel or on a desktop? If so then the sizing and position of it would be a KDE thing rather than an Amarok thing, so I assume it can be resized like other plasmoids. Maybe 'fullscreen mode' should be a generic Plasma option available to all plasmoids, maybe accessible via context menu. Could there (at some point in time) be an option for this plasmoid to display the selected vis if there is no video? Would be cool to be able to designate this plasmoid as 'the screensaver' - so you get vis or video in the panel or 'on top' window but when the screensaver would kick in it goes fullscreen...
Another one asking for full screen support. Like sepp said, enqueuing YouTube videos would be awesome, but playing them back full screen (as a sort of screensaver) would be even better.
Full screen support is useful.
I can understand not wanting to feature bloat it, but full screen support is a must
I can understand not wanting to turn amarok into a catch-all media player, but intentionally avoiding a full-screen option seems a bit limiting. Music videos are enjoyed at fullscreen, too.
But all in all, to fully grasp how much I appreciate this new feature: [jb@impact video]$ pwd /mnt/data/music/video [jb@impact video]$ du -h | tail -n 1 30.3G .
This plasmaoid is really a great thing. I was already setting up a KDE4 develop environment especially for hacking video support into Amarok, but now it seems that I can spin down that effort (revert back to drinking beer in the wknd
 )I however do agree that full screen is a must have.... well, nothing a few lines of code on my side can't fix right? Like jb, I also have quite a big video collection $ du -sh clips/ 64G clips/ Soo...
Genesis, IQ, Magma... Lots of Progressive Rock there and then you give us Christina Aguilera?
Sorry to whinge, but I have to agree with everyone else about fullscreen support being the make or break for this feature. Maybe a quick and easy way to launch the current playing video in dragon player (or whatever) would be a compromise solution.
Honestly, full screen playback when there's video support is pretty much a given in any application with such features.
Q: Isn't video playback with full screen support already supported in Phonon? http://api.kde.org/4.0-api/kdelibs-apidocs/phonon/html/classPhonon_1_1VideoWidget.html#d42a73c9228e7688f25d1f2364a576db It says the plasma widget enclosing that video widget would need to provide the keyboard event capture.
Nice, I like it, but can you add dailymotion support, the music videos are in very much better quality there:
http://www.dailymotion.com/
Cool, could you support Matroska Videos with tagging? I've started to put my music video collection into matroska containers with tagging...
Amarok-support for playback/tagging/musicbrainz these files would be awsome! I've many music videos I'd like to tag and play - in amarok! How about a "Videothek" for your music videos? (I'm really talking abou 100+ music videos, nut about adding a video player Videos aren't usually sorted by Artist/Album). Visualisations and Screensaver mode would be cool - as well as a standalone plasmoid (do you remember the hotkey to show all plasmoids? would be cool with video playback...)Rock on!
Amarok could have a inteligent shuffle (my englist sucks, sorry), like pandora's radio. So, it would choose the next music in the library tha mach the same aspects that the music before.
Please! Integrate it more with last.fm! Even the related videos.
Amarok + Last.fm = Definitive music experience!
Why not become a comprehensive media player via plugins?
Phonon, as I understand it, was created to make it easier for application developers to add new plugins, such as video. I'm not suggesting a huge bloated mess, but you have to realize that no one wants to learn two very different interfaces to access a variety of media. Gnome has already realized that with Banshee, a single program capable of viewing podcasts, video and music. Doing one thing well is important, I agree, and we REALLY do appreciate your hard work, but consistent interfaces when doing a particular group of tasks is even more important. I'd assume that if one of the other KDE media projects, such as Dragon Player, ever adds music and podcast support - then Amarok will lose its status as KDE's favorite player. It's all about meeting a normal user's expectations. If you will forgive the comment, that's why KDE 4 fell on its face when it was starting out: poor presentation. |
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