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On 2010-02-22, David McLeod <daiode@xxxxxxx> wrote:
If I understood it correctly, it seems a lot of time in that thread was spent arguing over file locations and directories. When it comes to scanning and finding media, there are three things that in my experience it always comes down to... 1. Manual: let the user add, file by file what they want. (metadata lookup is required after adding: again either manual or auto). a. This creates a database of alias like links to the files b. This moves the files into a neat defined folder structure (iTunes offers this option called 'Keep Organized'...frustrating for real power users and media collectors) 2. Media scanning/scraping: Launching the app invokes a media scanner to find new files and auto-sort everything. (Moovida, XBMC, Boxee etc) 3. An always on seperate application running in the background tracking files and locations. (not seen this tried, although Plex for Mac has what they call a media server which touches on that somewhat).
Thanks for the comprehensive recap David. Whatever the actual implementation is, it comes down to scanning folders containing media files (filesystem crawler), extracting metadata from the files themselves (gstreamer to the rescue) and collecting additional metadata from external sources (internet databases), and storing it in a database (ontology).
That is the ground for a good UI to display the media and allow navigating and playing it back.
Whether or not it should be a separate process that runs in the background, whether or not it should scan some standard folders by defaults, whether or not it should watch for changes in the folders and files, are implementation details.
I second Paul on making the media scanner a separate library/module (reminds me of coffee break discussions when I was against the idea...). Again, whether we then make it a standalone process or we integrate it in Moovida itself is an implementation detail that doesn't really matter at this stage.
The new media scanner, if I understand it correctly, is by design decoupled from Moovida's existing codebase, so we're already on the right tracks. And its pluggable design should make it easy to integrate fancy sources such as tracker and itunes in the future.
The more I think about it, the more I feel this media scanner thing can have a huge impact on the way media is understood and enjoyed on the desktop. Let's get it right and rock-solid!
Olivier
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