Blog

Like all good things, GSoC’14 had to come to an end. Thanks to my mentors, Shantanu and Peter, I was able to complete all the things I promised in my proposal. In this post I will try to summarize my whole work during the GSoC.

Hello World!

I have completed the MPRIS specifications Tracklist interface for PMC. Now other applications can view and control the current playlist in PMC over DBus. This was a part of my GSoC project. This interface will allow me to send commands to PMC, asking it to play a particular song in the playlist. After some changes to the Simon MPRIS plug-in, a user will be able to play a song in the current playlist by naming it. As the Simon plug-in is itself based on MPRIS specifications, it will be able to interact with any media player following the MPRIS specs.

With this, PMC is now MPRIS enabled.(Well it was complete even without the Tracklist interface, as it is optional, but I closed the bug after merging the tracklist work :P)

Hello folks!

This blog post is a week late (forgot I had a blog :P). This is an update on the status of my GSOC project. Last week, I added a command plug-in to Simon. This plug-in (called Media Player Control) allows Simon to send commands to any media player which follows MPRIS specifications, and most of the popular players do follow these specifications including (but not limited to) PMC, Amarok, VLC, Dragon.

The plug-in currently supports the commands:

• Play / Pause
• Stop
• Next / Previous
• Volume Up/Down
• Seek Ahead/Back

Some of you may be wondering that Simon already had a DBus plug-in, so why was this one needed? The existing DBus plug-in was only capable of calling methods over DBus (which is enough for most of the above mentioned commands) but the commands Volume Up/Down need to first get the value of volume and then increase/decrease it by some value. Also, we planned to add a feature to the plug-in through which a user can play any song in the playlist just by calling out it’s name (which will require the media player to expose MPRIS Tracklist interface). This was not possible using the plain DBus plugin.

The next steps in my project are:

• Add MPRIS Tracklist interface to PMC
• Improve the command plug-in to enable playing a media from the playlist by its name

Stay tuned for further updates (I hope I won’t be late again ;-)

Hello World!

I am selected in GSoC 2014 \o/ , and what makes it even better is the organisation, KDE and my mentors Shantanu Tushar and Peter Grasch. My project is “Integrate Plasma Media Center with Simon”. The result of which will allow users to interact with PMC (Plasma Media Center) using voice commands.

The first step of my project was to make PMC MPRIS compatible, so that it can accept commands from Simon or any other application using MPRIS specifications, and it is complete (reviewboard). So, if you are building PMC from the latest source (pull and build again :P), you can now control PMC with the “Now Playing” desktop plasmoid. I’ll post updates on my project as and when a development is made, so stay tuned!

Finally, I thank Google for conducting such a wonderful program to motivate students in contributing to open source projects and I thank my mentors and whole KDE community for giving me a chance to work with them.