KDE 4 Multimedia Meeting :: Done!

So the KDE 4 Multimedia meeting is finished with only minor casualties. Leinir missed his train and will be back here soon to spend another night in the beautiful village of Zundert - not completely voluntarily though. We will give it another try to send him back home to Denmark tomorrow. Today finally the sun showed up, resulting in a nice set of photos of the wild peacocks that are living in the neigbourhood of the Annahoeve.
One of the first things that grabbed our attention this morning was Gábor announcing that the Qt4 port of amaroK actually started.
Matthias told me that he redesigned the core of Phonon to make some neat introspection features available. We also discussed some vague use cases for Phonon which really showed why Phonon is an incredibly good idea, and that a simple audio / video backend such as GStreamer just doesn't cut it: Imagine you're listening to music while surfing the web. Then you're clicking on a link playing a video file embedded in a website, your music volume will be lowered so your the sound of the movie file, the movie file finishes playing and the music volume increases again - all done automatically. I'm obviously really looking forward to all that goodness.
Allan who already left earlier this afternoon showed us that seeking in KIO does actually work already for KIO file. That will make a wealth of new stuff possible, I'm imagining running amaroK with your music collection on a remote machine (and then of course playing your files using Phonon's NMM backend outputting the music to a remote machine), using digikam with the photo collection on a remote machine ...

All in all, the meeting has exceeded all our expectations by far. Not only have we seen a wealth of new stuff going into svn (check Danny Allen's latest svn digest, for example). We were able to offer the developers the possibility to meet each other in person, to exchange ideas that are not easily communicated via the Internet. The network effects of the meeting are not measurable, but probably even more important than the code that has actually been written, improved (or killed, such as the sexb^W eeh moodbar that's gone because it was unmaintained). We were also able to get the amaroK developers integrated more into the KDE community, probably another thing that's not measurable but a long-term important thing.

The concept of making an event possible where everything is taken care of - from quality food to travel expenses, computers for those that don't own a laptop, a great location, information material and above all a friendly host who is contributing in a very unique way to our project: Thanks Cees and José!

Tonight, after having dinner in a Wok restaurant where you could compile your own wok meal and have it prepared right in front of your eyes we couldn't resist and hooked up our notebooks onto the random neighbour's access point again and read blogs, comments on dot stories, e-mail and of course write a blogentry after a terrific and very special and productive KDE event.
Paraphrasing our good friend: I love this community.

[ Sun, 28 May 2006 23:31:19 +0200 ] permanent link

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