Bug 162024

@Peter: what do you think about this?

> @Peter: what do you think about this?

If somebody spends me some weeks of time, I'm fine with this ;-) Seriously: some questions need to be clarified first:

- Should the preview be shown for all movies inside a directory as soon as the directory is open? Or should only the focused movie be shown as preview? I see no sense showing animated previews for all movies at once...

- Or should the preview be only shown in the information bar?

- How long should the preview be shown?

- What should happen if the preview has been shown? Should it get restarted?

The answers to those questions have huge impact on the implementation, which will require quite some effort anyhow. Generally speaking the philosophy of Dolphin was always to make file management easy, but to let the applications itself handle all interaction with the files. E. g a movieplayer might be the better application than Dolphin to show previews...

From my point of view, the preview could be enabled on the information panel. The simplest thing to do should be to embed a small media player with the basic button like "play", "stop" and a slider for the position.

This could be extended not only for video files, but for audio files too.

An alternative should be to display this buttons directly on the icon (when focused).

Created attachment 24747 [details]
Examples of media preview in dolphin

Thanks for the mockup! From the implementation point of view embedding a player inside the information panel would be possible without big problems.

Displaying the slider on icons would only work with a quite large icon size and also would be very tricky to implement; I'm also not sure whether it makes any sense showing a video preview inside a 48 x 48 pixel area...

So if this bug-report is about "preview inside information panel", I think we can set this request to "NEW" and I'd give it a try for KDE 4.2... :-)

I agree with embedding the preview on the information panel.

I've changed the product to dolphin, ok?

> I've changed the product to dolphin, ok? 

Sure, thanks :-)

I'd imagine it to play all currently visible video files when you open the directory (ok, i have my previews at maximum size + sidebar = maximum of 20 files at once ^^)

> Should the preview be shown for all movies inside a directory as soon as the
> directory is open? Or should only the focused movie be shown as preview? I
> see no sense showing animated previews for all movies at once...

I got the idea because the preview pictures of the files in my simpsons directories are all the same (blue sky with white clouds) - i think e.g. for media centers this would be very convenient...

> How long should the preview be shown?

I guess showing the complete file would be easiest to implement - maybe just embed mplayer instances... (i also see no sense in limiting the timeframe, except maybe you want to cache the previews in ~/tmp or so and want to limit the filesize)

> What should happen if the preview has been shown? Should it get restarted?

I'd say so...

you know, i think all mainstream filebrowsers will have this functionality someday... maybe the processing power is too weak yet, but in 1-3 years i think it will be possible and it would be nice to have this feature first ^^

i think the best (most convenient) way of doing this would be an option
fixed count of preview frames <-> framerate, so

selecting option 1 and setting it to 5 frames would create 5 preview images: start, 25% through, 50% through, 75% through, end
selecting option 2 and setting it to 0.33 fps would show an image of every third second (this should not be cached imo...)

the user could increase the value in option 2 over time according to growing processing power - and if he sets it to 24fps someday, he'd have the functionality I requested...

setting option 1 to 1 frame would equal the current behaviour...

Initially it could be hardcoded using your first "option": 5 small preview images for each video file. Maybe when you enter on the directory you see only the first frame. If you hover the icon you could see the sequence of the frames looping... It is not bad this idea too :-)

I agree with FiNeX - this would be the same behaviour redtube.com has (which is quite convenient either)- *ahem* of course that's only what I heared from... friends... ;-)

Of course Viktor... of course.

*** Bug 157742 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Actually, this bug is a duplicate of Bug 157742 (Since 157742 is older) ... :D

But here we have more details! More comments!! Even a mockup!! That's great!

> I guess showing the complete file would be easiest to implement - maybe just embed mplayer instances... (i also see no sense in limiting the timeframe, except maybe you want to cache the previews in ~/tmp or so and want to limit the filesize) 

Well, I think it should use phonon instead of an "embedded mplayer instance", so we do not have to depend on gstreamer, mplayer, vlc , xine or whatever.

On KDE 4.2 SVN we have a video preview "mode" on open/save dialog (Just mark show preview on configuration, "focus" a video file with your mouse cursor and a video preview like the one in the mockup is shown). Maybe this code could be used to implement this feature.

Sorry for my English... learning...

Keep up the excellent work guys!

I'm voting on this in the hope of getting a successor to MPlayerThumbs for my Konqueror 4.x. (I don't use Dolphin because I'm addicted to using Konqueror as a generic tabbed file viewer/navigator)

With that in mind, it's probably best to (either randomly or heuristically) pick a frame from somewhere within the file for the icon preview. That's what MPlayerThumbs and Nautilus do and, in my experience, it results in a much more useful image than a simple black square (which, for my videos, the first frame usually is)

*** Bug 188680 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

The Information Panel allows to play videos since today :-) Some finetuning is still necessary until KDE 4.3 gets released, but it works quite well already.

Great news :-)