Defining interesting multimedia tasks

[Jonas Smedegaard]

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 09:09:12PM +0200, Adrian Knoth wrote:
>On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 08:44:01PM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
>
>>> * audio production: sound synthesis, audio editing, sequencing.
>>> * multimedia playing: vlc ;)
>>> * video production: ... I don't do this.
>>> * home multimedia center: xmbc/mediatomb style software.
>>>
>>> Or should we have a finer grained split?
>>
>> I imagine something like this:
>>
>>  * multimedia-gtk (enhancing e.g. gnome)
>>  * multimedia-qt (enhances e.g. kde)
>>  * multimedia-light (enhances e.g. lxde and xfce)
>>  * multimedia-tiny (enhances e.g. libphone-ui-shr)
>
>I cannot make qualified comments on these, but I somehow feel that only 
>eduacted users care about their widget library and/or desktop 
>environment. For everyone else, the distinction between GTK and QT and 
>even light and tiny is hardly obvious.
>
>
>But let's talk about the main point I want to cover:
>
>>  * multimedia-pro-audio
>>  * multimedia-pro-video
>>  * multimedia (recommending all of above)
>
>While I could perfectly live with the first two, the latter is probably 
>not the best choice: users could tend to read "Multimedia? Cool, give 
>me all." and end up with tons of software that's completely 
>inappropriate for them. They'll be facing a question about jackd 
>realtime priorities and probably more pro stuff.
>
>OTOH, producers might not want each and every single GTK+QT+whatever 
>movie player, desktop tool and the lot when installing a video editing 
>machine or digital audio workstation.
>
>Long story short: don't make a catch-all choice across consumer and
>producer variants.

Good point.

Let me try again:

  * multimedia (depends on multimedia-gtk | multimedia-playback)
  * multimedia-gnome (provides multimedia-playback; depends on
    Qt/Phonon-based and KDE apps)
  * multimedia-gtk (provides multimedia-playback; depends on
    GTK/GStreamer and GNOME apps)
  * multimedia-light (provides multimedia-playback; depends on
    apps _not_ linked against desktop-homogenizing libraries)
  * multimedia-tiny (provides multimedia-playback; depends on
    apps targeted embedded devices)
  * multimedia-pro-studio (depends on "classic" GUI style
    production tools like Ardour, JACK and Hydrogen)
  * multimedia-pro-live (depends on production tools designed
    for live mixing of audio and video)
  * multimedia-pro-devel (depends on scripting and programming
    tools like PureData and CSound)

With "depends on" I really mean "depends, recommends or suggests, 
weighted how we consider a nice user experience.

We can't (with current structures) serve all flavors of use equally 
well. but for each of the flavors we do serve well, we can suggest 
packages related to that flavor but deemed by us as overlapping and 
superfluous (which obviously means some other would favor those - else 
it had no point in being shipped with Debian at all!)

Also, I do dream about being able in the future to serve more 
fine-grained needs, and we need to start somewhere to realize how clumsy 
our current mechanisms really are for serving things like this: Imagine 
in the future being able through debconf or similar to explress "I want 
to "edit video", mostly "live" on relatively "low-end hardware" using 
strictly "GUI" interfaces.


  - Jonas

-- 
  * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
  * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
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