Version:           all (using KDE KDE 1.2)
Installed from:    Mandrake RPMs
OS:          Linux

Kde and specifically Konqueror does a great job of abstracting the user from the data types and makes things just *work*. However this has not been applied to the aria of the media player.

Kde has: kaboodle, noatun, kscd, and aKtion
And for misc. tasks it has: KMid, MMidi and KMix 

The problem with this is that it forces the user to decide which application is appropriate for what they want to do. This is a problem because they often overlap in terms of there functionality (IE: File Types) but not in terms of their purpose as perceived by the user. For example both the built-in player in Konqueror and Noatun can play mp3s. But one is preserved as being quick and easy, where as the other is more advanced, with play-lists, skins, etc. This would be fine if all the user had to do was decide weather he just wants to 'preview' the file or open it, and indicate this somehow. But this is not the case. If the user wants to open a mp3, they right-click goto open with ... and are presented with a list of: Kaboodle, Noatun, Embedded Media Player, Netscape Plugin Viewer, and fairly likely Xmms.

I think that Konqueror as the universal viewer is one of the greatest incremental advancements in computer usability ever. I think this should be extended to multimedia as well. This would eliminate the need for the user to learn multiple programs or different controls. Having a good Kde media player would also eliminate one of the major problems users have, which is artswrapper not working will, or causing a delay with, other audio/video players.

Bug reports like 26233 and 25176 are symptoms of a much larger problem. That Kde (and just about anything else) lacks the multimedia infrastructure and modularization to be able to support just about any new format as soon as the libraries are written. However this 'infrastructure' does exist, and is free software too. If you look at MPlayer, they support just about any type of Video and any type of Audio you can Imagine and it has a wide variety of video output drivers. However at this point it is essentially just an infrastructure. At this point it's GUI is very bad and is still viewed as temporary (until a better one is written.) This is what Kde can provide. It would be simple enough to incorporate MPlayer into Kde. It is written in C++ and it GUI is separate and so easily replaceable. It probably could even be embedded into another program (Like Konqueror). For a basic example look at http://sourceforge.net/projects/kmencoder	and	http://sourceforge.net/projects/kmplayer/

The important thing to remember is that in doing this the user should never see any of the internals. This is certainly not the case with MPlayer now, but Kde is very good in this regard. So ideally it would include all of the video library so as not to have massive dependencies. And it would also ideally select the best output type and codec available, and decide on what post-processing to use based on the file-type and scale it with the CPU available.

There should be an external program as well (external of Konqueror.) This would be more sophisticated and would have some ability to save files. (Convert to different types and some basic other things like crop and zoom for video and fades and such for audio.) The interface would have to be kept simple. Like have a menu for Audio/Video source, and another for Destination IE: the screen or the various appropriate file types, which if necessary would ask what audio/video format you want within them and then give a progress bar. All of this could be implemented using MEncoder, however later other things could be added like the aforementioned editing ability. (I don't know if there is a project that has done this which could be a source of good code, but it seems likely that one exists.) Another possibility would be to somehow link it to a CD burning program to make and then burn a VCD. But all this would take a long time to implement. Initially it would be a simple replacement for aKtion biased on MPlayer. But it also should play audio and show visualization plugins ala Noatun. (Perhaps using the same plugins and menus to combine the two applications with as little new code as possible)