Launchpad Entry: desktop-karmic-default-media-player-choice
Created: 2009-06-08
Contributors:
Packages affected:
Summary
The specification describes the selection of media player applications that will be used for karmic.
Release Note
This section should include a paragraph describing the end-user impact of this change. It is meant to be included in the release notes of the first release in which it is implemented. (Not all of these will actually be included in the release notes, at the release manager's discretion; but writing them is a useful exercise.)
It is mandatory.
Rationale
There are lots of applications around and it's good to revisit our choices and see if our selection still serves our users in the best way.
User stories
- Martin connects his new G1 phone to his laptop running karmic and he got asked if he wants to sync his music collection between the phone and the computer, he acknowledge the action and a few minutes later all the song which had been downloaded since the previous sync are uploaded to the device.
- Sebastien connects his iPod to a computer, from a quick glance at the nicely colored bar he can see how much free space is available on the device.
Design
- Having a small video player is useful, totem will still be used for that.
- Rhythmbox and banshee are both good players but banshee has people working full time on it, is moving faster and has features users expect from a modern music playing application which rhythmbox doesn't have yet.
- Karmic will switch to banshee if the issues which have been listed during the discussion are fixed before the feature freeze, otherwise we will revisit the decision next cycle.
Implementation
The following feature have to be confirmed in banshee before switching:
working accessibility (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=533030)
- support for magnatune
- use the current GNOME libraries (gtkbuilder, gio, etc)
- the rhythmbox importer has to work correctly
- the close and exit behaviour has to be changed to be consistent with the current rhythmbox behaviour or be an option
- the resource usage should be in the same order of magnitude as rhythmbox's
Those options would be nice to have:
- library watching
- crossfading effect
- jamendo
Migration
Banshee 1.5 can import rhythmbox's data (music collection, songs rating, etc).
Test Plan
The most commonly used feature should be tested and confirmed to be working correctly.