From kde-multimedia Fri Jul 04 13:25:22 2003 From: Will Stephenson Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2003 13:25:22 +0000 To: kde-multimedia Subject: Standard DCOP interface for KDE Media Players X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-multimedia&m=105732510824543 Hi I'm the author of a Kopete plugin called Now Listening. Its job is to report to your IM buddies what you're listening to. Currently, I talk to XMMS, Noatun and KsCD, and for each new player, I have to implement a new class to interface the player's own (DCOP) interface with my plugin. The DCOP interfaces, that each player exposes, are by and large very similar (see below). Other applications have had to follow a similar approach - the kicker applet MediaControl, in kdeaddons, talks to Noatun, XMMS and JuK in the same way, and I believe the Karamba and Slicker groups may have similar applets. There are other possible 'glue' apps, such as generic on screen display or text to speech of media information, central control apps that mute or pause media players when receiving a videophone call, or media choice driven automatic playlist generators. I've considered combining the interface I use with that of MediaControl to form a mini 'media player interface library' but the tight coupling this would introduce between different cvs components (if in kdemultimedia, apps using it would require it to be installed, if in kdelibs... yuck) is not attractive. To ease the lives of media player parasites such as myself, and media player authors like you, I suggest that a standard DCOP interface for KDE media players is needed. We could define a standard set of operations and their semantics that would be implemented by all music / video / radio players. It would also allow connection to brand new, previously unseen kde media players by checking for this interface. Please let me know if you think this suggestion would be useful and I'll post my first draft of a set of operations. I'm willing to rewrite the DCOP interfaces of individual apps (I've got a modified KsCD that has a playing() method here) but it's not worth doing alone, if there isn't consensus that this is a good idea. (Please cc: me on replies) Will -- Will Stephenson IRC: Bille _______________________________________________ kde-multimedia mailing list kde-multimedia@mail.kde.org http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-multimedia