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Saturday, April 21, 2012

Plasma Media Center running in Plasma Active

Yesterday I got some time to work on improving Plasma Media Center performance in the Plasma Active images provided by basysKom. Even when using opengl for rendering the performance in my VirtualBox installation and in real devices were not that good while using "gst-launch playbin uri=file:///" was visibly better.

After some research I have found this QVideoWidget class from QtMultimediaKit, which improved performance when it is used as QDeclarativeView's viewport.

For those who want to test PMC in Plasma Active (Meego or Mer) can downloaded it from my home project. If you use PA2 you need to first upgrade to a testing or devel package set since the packages were compiled against Qt 4.8.0 and PA2 uses Qt 4.7.4. To upgrade PA2 you need to do:
  • zypper refresh
  • zypper up
  • wait until zypper downloads a lot of MB of new packages and upgrade your system to a testing package set. If you have a slow connection I think you have better skip this process completely:-)
  • edit ~/.kde/share/config/kwin and change LayoutName=thumbnails to LayoutName=window_strip.
  • download PMC from my home project and install it: rpm -Uvh plasma-mediacenter-0.8.80+git20120421-1.i586.rpm
  • reboot the device

I created a video of PMC running in VirtualBox, but when I encoded it from theora to mp4 (using mencoder ) to uploaded it to youtube the audio and video were too desynchronized. I tried to fix the sync problem with no success, so no video this time.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

OK, I admire and appreciate your work developers but this is time for old and loud: to much fragmentation for christ sake! Hey KDE! I got an idea - focus on desktop! You want media center? Participate to xbmc. Stop making another useless fork. We all should realizie that less is more, to unite means more than "f*** you I will do my own useless meaningless unmaintainable soon to be abandoned piece of fork".

Lamarque said...

Feel free to provide xmbc packages for Plasma Active. PMC is not a fork of xbmc by the way.

Anonymous said...

It's nice to see more people working on PCM. The possibilities for QML based media center are endless and having well integrated media center functionality on wide variety of different kinds of devices is a huge plus.

I'm bit curious though; why QtMultimediaKit instead of Phonon?

Lamarque said...

I am not sure. I am not developing Plasma Media Center, I am just packing it for Plasma Active. We already use QtMultimediKit in Plasma Active (the first PA image is Meego based and QtMultimediaKit was basically created for Meego) and adding phonon-gstreamer would add another dependency that only one program uses. The changes to port from one to another are not that big either.

Anonymous said...

@Anonymous; Phonon is a high level API

sinny kumari said...

Hi Lamarque, thanks for your great work :)

Phonon QML support is not merged to master yet, so we have to use QtMultimediaKit

Anonymous said...

@first Lamarque: I know PMC is not a xbmc fork, I meant if you want good media center join forces and work together. It's just example how forking and choice in open source is misconception nowadays. You know why Linux (as kernel) works for all those years? Because there is one main branch, maintained with one constant vision leaded by one person who is doing what he's best at. Not Thousands of f*** half-done forks - everyone thinks that his vision is the best but look at mess what comes from that.

PS About packages, Plasma Active is still Linux right? xbmc is open source with linux support - where do you see problem?

Lamarque said...

"PS About packages, Plasma Active is still Linux right? xbmc is open source with linux support - where do you see problem?"

Clearly you have never packaged a program before.

The Linux kernel works because everybody needs it and there is no real good competition when it comes to things getting implemented fast. And no, almost no Linux distribution nowadays uses the vanilla kernel. All distributtions patch the kernel and Google even created an almost different kernel to use in Android.

I get your point that xbmc is probably good, but I did not know about it until you told me and I am not a PMC developer, so you talking to the wrong person here.

Lamarque said...

@sinny kumari, thanks :-)

Diederik van der Boor said...

Awesome stuff.

Btw, you know you can also give users access to your repository?

zypper addrepo http://repo.pub.meego.com/home:/lamarque/Project_KDE_Devel_MeeGo_1.2_OSS/home%3alamarque.repo
zypper install plasma-mediacenter

;-)

Lamarque said...

@Diederik van der Boor, I knew it, but my home project contains only experimental stuff. If you want a good way to break your installation just add my home project to your repo list :-)