[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: [xine-devel] Proposal for a common D-Bus interface for media players

[Brian J. Tarricone]

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Mike Melanson wrote:
> Allow me to inaugurate the flame war...
> 
> Rafaël Carré wrote:
>> That would let developers use this interface in their programs, and
>> let their users decide of which media player they wanna use. All
>> about FREEDOM.
> 
> I read this as: "Real problems are too hard to solve. Let's create 
> different problems and solve those instead!"
> 
> :)

That's somewhat similar to my reaction.  I can see a need for a
desktop/player-neutral audio API for things like sound notifications on
certain events, but I don't see why individual media players need to
have the same interface.  Users can already choose to use whatever they
want.  If I'm just an application that wants to launch the user's
preferred audio player (for example), there are already established ways
of doing that that don't even require D-Bus.

Embedding audio/video widgets in applications might be an interesting
use for this.  However, this bit is way more complicated than just
defining a common control interface, and varying feature-sets among
different players makes it hard to have real drop-in replacements.

Really, the only common use-case I can see here is the one mentioned in
the original post: writing a little remote control GUI for Kicker, or
gnome-panel, or xfce4-panel or whatever, and being able to have it
control any media player that supports The Interface.  For such a
limited use case, what's the point?

I'm not trying to say this is a stupid idea,  I'm just saying I don't
understand how it would be used by users and/or application developers.
 Come up with a decent list of *specific* potential real-world users of
this interface, and then we have a purpose.

	-brian

P.S.  Maybe this should be moved to something like xdg at freedesktop.org?
 I know I'm only subscribed to one of the lists on this cross-post, and
I have no idea if any of the other three will even go through.

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