On Tue, 04 Feb 2014 18:52:04 -0900
Greg Madden <gomadtroll@...> wrote:

> On Tuesday 04 February 2014 16:08:45 you wrote:
> > >7) all distros support mplayer in one form or another
> >
> > I suppose this is a packager problem, but the original idea of a
> > default player is no external dependencies.
> >
> > MPlayer is well supported but is not part of a stock installation
> > on all distros. Other dependency presumptions exist in Trinity (for
> > example, xine for amarok), yet nominating kmplayer as a default
> > video player and moving into tdemultimedia means MPlayer needs to
> > be installed.
> >
> > Audio players are not the same challenge. We have kaboodle, noatun,
> > and juk, all installed by the base package tdemultimedia.
> >
> > Fixing kaboodle gets us half way home. The other half is update
> > kaboodle to support newer generations of avi/mpg and like or not,
> > probably should support flv. For a default player that will
> > suffice. People who want extensive video format coverage are going
> > to install something else anyway.
> >
> > For Trinity users those additional apps will be kaffiene and
> > kmplayer for video and amarok for audio. Not a problem for those
> > types of users. We are discussing a basic default video player for
> > the first-time out-of-the-box Trinity experience.
> >
> > Darrell
> 
> Never could get kaboodle & kmplayer to 'just work' for random streaming 
> media, checking the 'depends' for those two comes up with a 
> signifcantly shorter list of codecs et al installed compared to mplayer 
> and (my fav) vlc. this is on a Debian system.
> 
> Problem with desktop environments, apps that no longer or never did 
> work, not being able to go outside the box and use best of breed apps. 
> TDE has some 'best' apps, mine=gwenview, digikam, k3b, kmail, can using 
> other non-tde apps be considered ? Is this what the gtk-qt widget stuff 
> is for?

The gtk-qt stuff is for making gtk applications look like they belong inside Trinity,
for those for whom that's a concern.  Shipping a gtk-based application is not
what we want here--I think we can all agree on that.

I think that, in the end, we have three options:


1. Get kaboodle up to snuff.

PRO:  No outside dependencies, no change to the tde-multimedia metapackage.

CON:  Imposes a *large* coding burden in the form of creating and maintaining
codecs.


2. Move kmplayer into tde-multimedia.

PRO:  Probably the most versatile of our players, with a selection of backends
and codecs.  Less broken than kaboodle.  Appears to have more i18n options
than kaffeine, judging from the old ebuilds I checked.  Chances are that, if we
make this the default, most users will never need another player.

CON:  It does still have some apparent breakage which will need to be addressed.


3. Move kaffeine into tde-multimedia.

PRO:  We know that this one has been maintained, so there should be little or
no breakage.  Uses xine-lib as a backend, so we don't have to worry about
codec maintenance.

CON:  xine-lib doesn't support the insanely wide range of codecs that mplayer
does.  kmplayer used to provide about ten handbook translations, but kaffeine
has none, AFAIK, unless they've been done recently.  It does have a few
interface translation options that kmplayer doesn't, like traditional Chinese.


E. Liddell