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KDE Releases Plasma Media Center 1.0

Posted by Unknown on from the ooo-shiny dept.

jrepin writes "KDE is proud to announce the first release (1.0.0) of Plasma Media Center. Built on Plasma and KDE technologies. Designed to offer a rich experience to media enthusiasts. KDE's Plasma Media Center (PMC) is aimed towards a unified media experience on PCs, Tablets, Netbooks, TVs and other devices. Plasma Media Center can be used to view images, play music or watch videos. Media files can be on the local filesystem or accessed with KDE's Desktop Search." The screenshots look OK. You have to build it yourself to try it (looks easy on Ubuntu but not Debian unstable because of a few missing dev packages).

22 comments

  1. Awesome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Just what I was looking for and it looks great on videos. Plasma technology really seams to be powerful and flexible. Why doesn't Ubuntu just use Plasma as base for their desktop. Anyways great job KDE!

    1. Re:Awesome by burdickjp · · Score: 4, Informative

      I concur about Ubuntu getting behind KDE. It would be very cool for them to build their Unity components as plasmoids. There are already plasmoids to mimic the Unity desktop. they're already looking at going QT and QML for their convergent desktop. It makes sense, it really does.

    2. Re:Awesome by Enderandrew · · Score: 4, Interesting

      They had Unity built on Qt, but I think it was just the 2D with no compositing fall-back mode. With Plasma and Qt, it should be trivial to make a Unity desktop shell with QML.

      Their new phone stack uses uses Qt and QML.

      I don't understand half using Gnome and using Qt at this point.

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    3. Re:Awesome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why does it always seam like anonymous cowards are all high school dropouts?

    4. Re:Awesome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      And Miguel is gone from Linux so he can't even try to fuck up KDE like he did Gnome.

    5. Re:Awesome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Forget Ubuntu. Just use a decent KDE distro like OpenSUSE instead.

  2. The 10ft interface... by jedidiah · · Score: 2

    How's the 10ft interface with LIRC and such?

    A browser (or even file mangler) with an IR remote optimized interface could be even by itself a nice addition to may HTPC setups.

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  3. Sounds perfect for me by mcgrew · · Score: 1

    The PC using a TV as a monitor is running kubuntu right now. Guess I'll have to RTFAs to see what system requirements are...

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  4. Gnome is now irrelevant. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    We were checking out Debian Testing which seems to have kde4 as default.

    Holy crap is the desktop really great now. Kudos to the KDE devs and the QT folks for such an emazing environment. Looks like we will be switching our 400 desktops from Gnome to KDE4 now.

    Gnome is completely irrelevant now.

    1. Re:Gnome is now irrelevant. by Nerdfest · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You can actually kind of have the 'best' of both, using KDE to emulate the appearance and functionality of Gnome for the most part, but without its limits. I'm a recent KDE convert and am enjoying it quite a bit. I'm a little disappointed that so much atention in the desktop community is focused on Gnome and Unity these days.

    2. Re:Gnome is now irrelevant. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You can actually kind of have the 'best' of both, using KDE to emulate the appearance and functionality of Gnome for the most part, but without its limits. I'm a recent KDE convert and am enjoying it quite a bit. I'm a little disappointed that so much atention in the desktop community is focused on Gnome and Unity these days.

      I like Gnome 2.x because of the default layouts with bars at the top and bottom, windowing, keystrokes, etc. If there was a simple "Gnome 2.x Layout" checkbox that set KDE to imitate Gnome, I would love that. I use so many computers that I didn't bother with KDE because I would have to change settings on all of them every time I reinstalled on those computers. That was too much work so I stuck with Gnome.

    3. Re:Gnome is now irrelevant. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Well you can use scripting of KDE Plasma to setup the layout. See this example and the Plasma Desktop Scripting documentation. Then you can probably create just one script and run it on all systems to set them up.

    4. Re:Gnome is now irrelevant. by unixisc · · Score: 1

      We were checking out Debian Testing which seems to have kde4 as default.

      Holy crap is the desktop really great now. Kudos to the KDE devs and the QT folks for such an emazing environment. Looks like we will be switching our 400 desktops from Gnome to KDE4 now.

      I thought that Debian now comes w/ XFCE as the default

    5. Re:Gnome is now irrelevant. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Uhh... I'm sort of lost to why it has to be that complicated, KDE is fully configurable via GUI. Of course, for replication you might want a config patch to update all your installs at the same time but really, KDE is not GNOME, you are not supposed to edit KDE config files by hand.

  5. Dont really need it by future+assassin · · Score: 1

    What is needed is 10 foot ui browser and applications. I can set up KDE to look nice with the current Mint 14.

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  6. I've been planning a living room XBMC system, by pecosdave · · Score: 1

    and have had great results setting one up for my kids netbook, but this may be more appealing.

    Since this is essentially a KDE shell does anyone know if there's a "pretty" way to do things like ROMs? I have PS1 games ripped and can play them on my desktop - could this present my games in a way that rivals that of the PSP when I load the same games on it? Possibly using the same app I use to build the info for the PS1 disk? How about ROMs from cartridge systems?

    I've used the XBMC plugin for browsing/playing ROMs, but to say the least it's not quite up to the quality of the rest of the program.

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  7. XBMC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Sounds/looks like XBMC, which is cool. Isn't XBMC already well suited for embedded devices though?

  8. What's with the mouse cursor on the tablet demo? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I mean, why?

  9. Interface customization by Immerman · · Score: 1

    That's great if you're setting up a whole bunch of machines at once, but it means you have to do far more work if you're just setting up one machine today, then another 6 months later, then another... Moreover the script that worked today's release may quite possibly not work quite right on next year's distro, possibly even fouling things up in a way that's not immediately obvious or convenient to fix.

    I too would love to some sort of mechanism to conveniently overhaul the interface - call it a skin or facade or whatever. After installation just make it really easy for me to completely "customize" my interface - there's lots of sites out there with vast libraries of screenshots of different peoples' highly customized desktops - why not make an easy standardized way for those same people to include a profile file that I can click on to instantly convert my desktop to mirror theirs? Not only would it be convenient, such a mechanism could potentially vastly accelerate the interface evolution, because let's be honest - the hardworking programmers giving us all these wonderfully powerful, configurable interfaces probably aren't the best folks to have doing the actual last-mile fine-tuning for maximum benefit. They're just not representative of the larger population of end users.

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  10. Stop unifying things! by czernabog · · Score: 1

    I really don't like this trend of "unifying the experience" across all possible devices. It's dumb. We have a very wide range of devices with different features and purposes. This mentality is what ruined Windows 8, Ubuntu with Unity and anything with Gnome 3 or KDE 4 on top. Give me an interface best suited for the type of device I'm using, instead of clumsily trying to make a one-size-fits-all aberration.