[MPlayer-dev-eng] new gui

[ods15 at ods15.dyndns.org]

On Sat, Dec 10, 2005 at 08:43:27PM +0100, Guillaume POIRIER wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 12/10/05, Reynaldo H. Verdejo Pinochet <reynaldo at opendot.cl> wrote:
> 
> > - Is this needed at all, or is just me thinking the actual code
> >   is far from perfect?
> 
> There are several 3rd party front-ends available... Why not pick one
> that would be "good enough" and make it the official one? Why
> re-invent the wheel?
> 
> I don't use any of them, but this one looks okay on the screenshots:
> http://kmplayer.kde.org/screenshots.php

KMPlayer I believe is the best available MPlayer frontend, although tbh 
I've never tried it or just about any other mplayer frontend. But I still 
don't really like it as the "official" MPlayer frontend, as it's KDE... 
Having GTK as official frontend is bad enough, KDE IMO is even worse...

> > - Is gtk the only and *best* choice for this?
> 
> QT is availble on Unix, Windows, OSX. I don't know about GTK, though I
> know it works on Unix and Win.
> 
> 
> > - Is there any good reason why not to make the new gui use
> >   slave mode for most of his tasks?
> 
> The only sane way is to use slave mode you mean!

Actually, the main reason most MPlayer frontends suck, is because the use 
slave mode! There is no (stable) "slave mode" API, and just about all IPC 
in general suck, the best way is from within the same code, it has most 
control and responsiveness from the player. So I vote for a new gui to be 
done WITHIN mplayer, not with slave mode

> > - Is making the gui themable (on top of what desktop/wm themes
> >   offer) a priority?
> 
> I think it would be neat, but I'm fairly confident that any graphica
> toolkit allows you to map some bitmaps to any of the buttons of the
> gui, don't they?

I personally like the MPC style for video players, which is quite a lot 
like KMPlayer I guess, and that generally involves the wm's themes. I hate 
skins with a vengence, all skins, even skins which look like there is no 
skin, if you do make a gui, either make it not have skins at all, or have 2 
modes...

- ods15