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Maniphest T8149

Rewritten Dragon player UI in Kirigami (QML)
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I have keep in mind to write a QML / Kirigami UI for Dragon player, but i want to be clear that none aims that task.

  1. Do KDE / community wants in that approach
  2. Does phonon works in Plasma Mobile to have double win Desktop + Mobile experience
  3. I think it's good to keep most of C++ code base only UI parts to be in QML

If someone has this in mind we can reassign to it or if someone is good in QML (i should investigate more to understand how to do it) and want to do it i can offer a full support.
I add Elisa members because theirs player look great :)

anthonyfieroni created this task.Mar 5 2018, 2:43 PM
anthonyfieroni triaged this task as Wishlist priority.
sitter added a comment.Mar 5 2018, 3:09 PM

Many moons ago I actually rewrote dragon in QML and didn't like it https://cgit.kde.org/scratch/sitter/dragon.git/ (mostly because Qt4 qml was fairly meh and I didn't know what I was doing).
When working phonon for Qt5 I again wrote some reimplementations in QML https://cgit.kde.org/scratch/sitter/phonon5-examples.git/tree/ for testing.

Since then, Jens Reuterberg and I also had the genius idea of taking dragon back to its roots by doing away with every single piece of UI which isn't absolutely necessary and came up with this:

essentially you only get a UI if nothing is playing or you move the mouse. At all other times the video is consuming 100% of the available space. And even when the UI is visible it only contains the bare minimum. If you are playing you can pause, if you are paused you can play, if it detects that you are the end of a file and can find another file you can jump to the 'next' file. You'd also have no volume slider. Scrolling changes volume. It's a very aggressive design notion, directly opposite VLC's does-it-all UI bloat.

From a technical perspective: as I have said multiple times I would suggest looking into using upstream libvlc QML bindings. libvlc does everything dragon needs, it is easy to use, super reliable, the devs are good friends of KDE, and of course vlc plays simply everything.

mgallien added a comment.Mar 5 2018, 4:26 PM

I am a bit reluctant to use vlc directly given that it is not packaged in Fedora. @sitter do you have more information about the package situation ?

I would really like to use vlc directly given that it provides a very good out of the box experience. Qt Multimedia is bad in comparison.

anthonyfieroni added a comment.Mar 5 2018, 4:33 PM

But Qt itself uses GStreamer and it has QtMultimedia, it can be used without external depends, right? This is "native" decision about me.

mgallien added a comment.Mar 6 2018, 7:55 AM
In T8149#131587, @anthonyfieroni wrote:

But Qt itself uses GStreamer and it has QtMultimedia, it can be used without external depends, right? This is "native" decision about me.

Yes, it is the main reason Elisa is using it. On the other hand, people need to have the right set of gstreamer codecs installed. On Windows it is even worse. One would need to bundle a codecs pack.

Vlc does not need those.

jbkempf added a subscriber: jbkempf.Mar 12 2018, 8:10 AM

I am a bit reluctant to use vlc directly given that it is not packaged in Fedora. @sitter do you have more information about the package situation ?

There is no actual reason Fedora is not packaging libVLC: libVLC is split in the same way as GStreamer is, in a lot of plugins.

It's always doable to not ship the problematic plugins or split them in separate packages.