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MPRIS Reloaded

Real Name of Submitter: 
Alex Merry
Photo: 
Short Bio: 

Alex has been involved, to varying degrees, in KDE since shortly after work on 4.0 started, particularly in Plasma and Amarok. The intersection of these two projects was the mechanism for controlling and getting information from a media player: MPRIS. In the meantime, he has started a PhD and worked on a couple of open source projects (Quantomatic and tikzit) related to his research.

Talk Abstract: 

MPRIS was meant to unify the wildly disparate mechanisms for querying and controlling desktop media players, using the new-fangled D-Bus. It made slow headway, partly due to lack of interest and partly due to serious shortcomings in the design of the spec itself.

Last year, Alex Merry (Amarok) and Mirsal Ennaime (VLC) simultaneously decided to do something about it. With helpful input from various people on the mpris mailing list, MPRIS 2 was born: a much more efficient, easier to use interface. It has already been implemented in several popular media players, and Ubuntu are using it for their Sound Menu implementation.

This is a brief talk about why the revision was necessary and how we solved some of the issues, and should be interesting to anyone working on media players or code that interfaces with them, or designing D-Bus interfaces.