Screenshot portrait layout:

Screenshot landscape layout:

If no album art is visible, the controls appear in exactly the same spot, to prevent the controls from jumping around on changing tracks. The disadvantage is that the controls are not centered if there's no album art.

Looks good! :)

Do we really need to have the margin around the image? Or is it that the image is too small?

Landscape looks great! For portrait, the image seems too small, and gets overwhelmed by the margins around it, particularly on the left and right sides.

A propse:

With the limited Spotify controls:

With full controls:

Without artwork:

The artwork has a fixed aspect ratio. In the first image the artwork uses the full width leaving space at the bottom. In the second image the height of the screen is fully used resulting in the artwork not using the full width.

This is generated by the following activity_mpris.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout
    xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:orientation="vertical"
    android:paddingLeft="25dp"
    android:paddingTop="25dip"
    android:paddingRight="25dip"
    android:paddingBottom="15dip"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent"
    android:gravity="center_vertical">

    <ImageView
        android:id="@+id/album_art"
        android:layout_width="match_parent"
        android:layout_height="0dp"
        android:layout_weight="1"
        android:layout_marginBottom="25dip"
        android:scaleType="fitCenter" />

    <include
        android:layout_width="match_parent"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        layout="@layout/mpris_control" />
</LinearLayout>

That looks better to me.

When no artwork is available the controls stay at the bottom instead of being centered. We could

1. Leave it this way. Not pretty IMHO, but not too bad
2. Set the visibility to GONE (hence center the controls) only when no artwork is available at all and set it to INVISIBLE when loading the artwork
3. Create a default artwork

How it looks:

I'm not entirely satisfied with this placeholder image, so suggestions are welcome.

Can you confirm that something like https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=370890 won't happen?

In D9564#192519, @nicolasfella wrote:

Can you confirm that something like https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=370890 won't happen?

I can for portrait mode: the ImageView uses the remaining space instead of a fixed amount. In landscape mode it uses half of the screen, but I think that's not a problem in practice. The height of the layout is more limiting, and that's unchanged in landscape mode.

I've tested it quite some time. Works really well, but I noticed some visual glitches. I will give details in a couple of days.

When using a player that doesn't provide artwork (I tested it with plasma browser integration) the UI glitches when hitting the play/pause button.

It also occurs when the player is played/paused directly

It's because the mpris player reports canPlay as false (for a very small period), so the play/pause button disappears. It's made more obvious by the image, but that's not the cause.

I'd suggest disabling the play/pause button instead of removing it, that's more logical for the user too. What do you think?

That sounds reasonable

I'll do that in a separate diff, as it's more general than only the album art.