[MPlayer-dev-eng] new gui

[Guillaume POIRIER]

Hi,

On 12/10/05, Reynaldo H. Verdejo Pinochet <reynaldo at opendot.cl> wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 10, 2005 at 08:43:27PM +0100, Guillaume POIRIER wrote:
> > 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?
>
> You could be right, but there must be some reason why that
> direction (simple as it looks) hasnt been embraced yet, i can
> think of one without too much hazle:
>
> those guis are made by users to users, they build upon what mplayer
> can do at a given time. Even the smallest changes on the way
> the underlying app operates could render them unusable and
> we all know mplayer will need some severe rethinkering sooner
> or later. That been said I kinda feel an 'official' gui has
> to be made by mp devs to mp users carefully taking their
> sugestions without loosing track of the minimal (and sometimes
> not-so-minimal) changes each new idea, each cvs commit, introduces.

We don't have to break things every time we modify MPlayer!!!
Also, do we have enough man power available to maintain some new code?
MPlayer is fat enough that I think it's high time trying to see what
can be removed than trying to see what could be added.

I do think it would be great to offer as much things as possible
though slave mode as any progress made on slave mode could be used by
other 3rd party projects.
In other words, I prefer the idea of chopping off all the tentacles of
the existing Gui an work alongside with the other projects to see what
can be made to help them out.


> to conclude, IMHO, or we develop an in-house gui or we simply
> wipe out the gui from the code base and make an effort to
> provide an stable API upon wich, users that feels the need
> could build his own graphical user interfaces.
>
> We can as well forget about having a gui at all, but hey! there
> is one already, it has to be a reason why...

The fact that existing Gui has not be maintained for some time makes
me wonder why a newer one would be better maintained, and how can the
new gui could be done right. I don't know much about Gui development,
but I know that there is a design pattern that can be used to do it
right (is it view/controller?)... Now, is MPlayer's design
sufficiently well made to handle that kind of design pattern? I don't
know.


> > > - 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.
> >
>
> i just dont like QT, i never used it partly because i dont do C++
> and have not plans to do so in the near future,

Well, I imagine that there are probably half of ppl around here who
don't like Qt, half ppl who don't like GTK, and the rest who don't
like any of those.

Luca Barbato told me about a graphical toolkit derived from enlightmen
project that look very promising... sadly, I don't remember what was
its name.


> besides, (and
> please correct me if im wrong ) AFAIK, qt is 'freewared' only on linux.

Ismail will probably comment on that. I think that there are free Qt
implement everywhere now.


Guillaume
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