elisa-developers team mailing list archive

[Paul van Tilburg <paul@xxxxxxxx>]

Hello all,

On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 12:39:43AM +0000, David McLeod wrote:
> What is meant by the term 'Media Exploration?' I think this little
> video shows you some simple and fun things that can be explored for
> music:  http://vimeo.com/7854609

I was showering and thinking about this and other things I would do
differently if I were to mold Moovida/Elisa a bit.  So, here is another
brain dump.  Note that it is meant conceptually, of course.

* Playing is sequential

This is something that Moovida does not ensure very well.  For example,
while exploring you can accidently activate an album while listening to
a webstream and Moovida immediately forgets about this and starts the
album.  There is no way back.  The player should iterate over a list. 
This list can be cleared, reordered, history and future are available,
and contains any sort of media item...  tracks/tv show episode/movies/
entire albums/tv show seasons, etc.  Combined with bookmarks remembering
positions in long files (e.g.  movies, TV shows, podcasts, livesets),
this is a strong concept that appeals to the intuition of a lot of
people.  So, maybe very item could be either "played/view now" or "added
to the list".

* Exploration is parallel

During playback you might want to explore this contextual media in the
way as show by the video pointed to by David.  Or you might want to
browse your own stuff and just queue some new album played after the
current one.  It is clear that this is often done in parallel, it
shouldn't bother the playback flow.  Now when you start to explore
when playback is going on it is hard to get back to the playback
without affecting the exploration part... namely to get back to
the player you have to press Back many times, killing all kind of
controllers from the previous exploration part.

So, what about if we have 4 views/tabs/modes/...

1. Local/Internet media browser, the one we kind of have now starting
   from the main menu.
2. Contextual view, with info such as lyrics, wikipedia/IMDB/TV.com/...
   info on the thing currently playing.
3. Playlist
4. Player

I am not sure how the navigation should work...  maybe the Contextual
and Playlist views should be kind of dashboards over the player (using
this nice smoked glass/blur effect ;)).  Florian told me Moovida was
supposed to have this mini-player in the browser/menu part.  This would
be excellent to switch back to the player and encourage this
parallellism.  Probably it's also a good idea to be able to jump directly
to the playlist too, since in browser mode you'r often manipulating the
list.  So, we have something in the top bar something like:

[Title.... /Path]                  [ MiniPlayer ] [List] [Play] [Stop]

Anyway, I'm starting to dive into details.  I hope I've been able to
emphasised that for me there is more to this "Playback is paramount"
principle.  I want to know what I have been playing recently, what is
playing now, what is going to be played and this should be easily
manipulated.  

I think the above ideas are not that complicated and shouldn't require
an entire overhaul of the core (I hope).  Let me know what you think!

Kind regards,
Paul

-- 
PhD Student @ Eindhoven                     | email: paul@xxxxxxxx
University of Technology, The Netherlands   | JID: paul@xxxxxxxx
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