Videos

Introduction

It would be nice to have a simple and elegant replacement for using Files to show the Videos directory.

Designers

Jon McCann

Objectives

Primary

• View local and online/cloud videos collections
• A player for DLNA media servers
• See new videos shared by friends
• View full screen viewing
• Share videos (email, IM, ?)
• Upload videos
• Show video properties
• Control:
  • Aspect ratio
  • Display subtitles
  • Alternate audio tracks
  • Rotation
  • (maybe) Change angles/camera

Secondary

• Act as a DLNA media server

Constraints

• Not an editor
• Not a management tool

Relevant Art

iOS

VLC on iOS

YouTube on iPad

WebKitGTK+

Android

Media Explorer

WebOS

Discussion

• Remember position feature:
  • Implemented in Totem
  • Only useful for certain types of media (films)
  • Only above a certain length?
• How to present optical media
• How to present TV adapters, with a list of channels
• How to present online sources (2 types, search and browse)
• Possible fullscreen controls:
  • quick-rewind (circle arrow with "30" in the middle) (iOS)

  • automatic cropping (<||> icon) (iOS, Totem keyboard only)

  • playlist skipping (|<</>>|)

  • exit fullscreen mode
  • show/hide shell panel when popups are visible
  • stream seeking and buffering information
  • volume changes
  • display of time elapsed/remaining
  • stream or file name
  • adding/removing from play queue, favourites (depending on application)

Tentative Design

Jon's original mockups

Series grouping wireframes:

Comments

• Act as a DLNA media server

  • why? shouldn't sharing stuff through DLNA (and other means) be taken care of through Privacy & Sharing? Or maybe it could be just a link to the appropriate place in Privacy & Sharing

• (Dis)similarity to Music

  • shouldn't be Videos almost identically looking as Music? control elements (play, pause,... ) and the location of those elements. (and maybe the dark vs white color, but that I find personally irrelevant.)

• Totem in it's actual stage is very awesome and great of features, just navigating between "properties", "browse" and "playlist" and so on all in sidebar is somehow uncomfortable. Also the playback of a DVD is strange by the menu - but cool by "browse". Also "search" is helping for youtube videos fine, but "browse" is cluttered. So somehow unifing the media access would be required. It is a common problem to figure out how to play a copied DVD folder structure. Your task is hard, but please make it lovely

• The ability to browse library while video plays in a mini window would be nice, allowing videos to be queued in playlist.

See Also

• More mockups at https://github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/tree/master/videos

• http://blog.synology.com/blog/?p=1267