Defining interesting multimedia tasks

[Felipe Sateler]

On 17/08/10 17:54, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> 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)

I believe that each DE will have installed it's own media player. Is
there really a need for multimedia-{gnome,kde,gtk} tasks?

>  * 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)

While I know that the tasks are not meant to be disjoint sets, I think
that this split has too much overlap. In particular, both csound and
puredata can be (and are frequently) used for live coding, and I suspect
all sound programming languages can be too. So multimedia-pro-devel
would be contained within multimedia-pro-live.
Or maybe it is something else you are splitting on and I'm just confused
by the names?

-- 
Saludos,
Felipe Sateler