elisa-developers team mailing list archive

[Olivier Tilloy <olivier@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Man, brain dumps may be good, but not very edible in their raw form.
Some random remarks (inline) on parts of your musings follow.

On 2010-02-21, Paul van Tilburg <paul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello guys,
>
> Sorry for the late reply.  David's long mail required some digestion
> and I also had to find the time.
>
> On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 05:18:07PM +0000, David Mcleod wrote:
> > I wasn't sure about where or if I should add all this on the Wiki. 
> > Instead I will share it via email for now.  [...]
> > Here you go...*KABAM!!!*....
> >
> > Problems With Media Centers In General
> >
> > - Heavy reliance on API's or crappy RSS Feeds
>
> I agree with you on this.  However, a lot of sites trust that this is
> the way users in general want to gather this stuff.  And we are not
> going to be able to change this fact by per principle not replying on
> feeds and/or APIs.

Well, for simple content plugins, an RSS feed is much better than an API 
to implement. Some important work has already been done by Florian and 
Ugo to make the task of plugin developers really easy. It's not complete 
yet, but I have played with it a bit and I think there are some good 
ideas there.

> > - Content isn't in a form that is easily 'captured'
> > - Content is usually not high quality but marketed as being better.
>
> True, but this is not something we can change.

But it's very likely that we'll see more and more HD content become 
available. Determining what content to offer in Elisa will be kind of a 
natural selection process.

> > - Translating the web for TV for every site/plugin is tiresome

As mentioned above, the work started by Florian and Ugo will help a lot 
in making content plugins development easy, fast and fun.

> I have been using Miro a lot and there it works quite well.
> They are on "my mother can use it" level (tested this :))...  you browse
> through the guide (http://miroguide.com), select a feed and watch.
> Actually, I have been running the Miro app a lot in parallel with Moovida
> and let if feed it's library (although nothing is recognised by
> the scanner of course).
>
> > - Difficult to just find something to watch outside 'my' content
> >   (Instead App/Plugin Hopping)
>
> Yes, agreed!  I found this also weird in Moovida.  I had to go to Youtube
> and search.  Ok, by now you can do video search and also find things
> in Vimeo at the same time but still.  Should I care whether I have it
> local, in some feed that is downloaded in the background or plain online?

+1! In fact I think the default action for online content should be 
"search", and search results should be aggregated and presented in a 
clever way.
I also think that it's important to allow users to access content from a 
specific source. If I know the video I'm looking for is on youtube, it 
will be faster for me to search it in the dedicated youtube section.

> > - Users have to wait for developers to build an App/Plugin to get
> >   access to content they like.
>
> This is a reoccurring theme on the Internet.  Either you make something
> generic, but then it's get complicated due to the fact that the world,
> the Internet, is not perfect--there are exceptions everywhere, or... 
> you make specific plugins that shield the user from this complications
> and exceptions.  I feel that this is a fact of life, unfortunately.

Generic means very limited, most of the time. It basically comes down to 
browsing an RSS feed and playing back the media.
For more advanced features such as uploading pictures, or login/logout, 
it goes through a custom API and therefore requires some specific code 
to be written and maintained.

> This does not mean however that it should be hard to write plugins.
> If I look at some of Moovida's Internet media plugins internals they are
> quite full of code, but actually it comes down to some tables (list
> controllers), i.e. some fixed/dynamic list of categories and RSS feeds
> tied to them.  So, making a plugin for my_media_site shouldn't be more
> than defining such a table, done.  On the other hand, it does not mean
> that it should be hard to access media that is offered on some site for
> which there is no plugin.  This is also the direction that
> makeinternettv.org is heading.  All kinds of blogging software and
> services offer to create some way to setup a feed of your stuff.  If I
> use an RSS feed reader, I can often just point to
> http://someinterestingsite.com and it'll find the goods.
>
> > - App/Plugin driven, not 'search based' (meaning I don't care how or
> > where the media comes from, long as its the best possible)
>
> Ah, yes, the point I was making above.
>
> > - When I want good quality stuff, I want to be able to buy it. Now.

s/buy/{watch,listen to}/

> A tough thing to setup though?
>
> > Specific Problems With Moovida/Elisa
> >
> > - Playback needs to be on par with VLC
>
> Definitely.  I think everyone agrees on this.
>
> > - Ignores other media players and 'clues' to what the media is when scanning.
>
> Yes, I was discussing this on the channel the other day. It is also the
> other way around.  If Moovida's media scanner finds some info, why will
> Moovida keep it to itself.
>
> > - Local content and playback has to be solid before attempting anything more.
>
> Fully agree.
>
> > - Media scanning needs to be better or equal to XBMC/Boxee (people
> >   complain about it being bad there though as well)

Definitely needs to be *better*. And it will be (or so I was said).

> I'll have to test the new media scanner branch to see where we stand now.
>
> [...]