Hi all, not sure if the mailing lists are the right place to have this discussion. If someone has a suggestion for where to put this instead, please let me know.
For a while now I have been flirting with the idea of making sequence thumbnails work in Dolphin, mainly because that's a feature I would really love to see myself. What I mean is this: When you hover e.g. a video file, its icon should switch between multiple frames from the video instead of just showing you one single thumbnail. Kind of like video hosting sites like YouTube do it. Code for this seems to be present in kio (ThumbSequenceCreator, KIO::PreviewJob()::setSequenceIndex()) and kio-extras (the thumbnail KIO slave that forms the backend of KIO::PreviewJob). There is even full code for switching between these sequence thumbs in the KIO models (KDirModel, via DelegateAnimationHandler). But there are two issues. First, I haven't found a single thumbnailer plugin that actually uses ThumbSequenceCreator. And second, Dolphin uses its own item views and models that do not reuse any of the existing KIO code. The first isn't a big issue, as it should be simple to adapt something like kffmpegthumbnailer to output different frames depending on sequence index. The second issue is the one I'm concerned about. It seems like it would either require writing the code again from scratch for Dolphin's model/view classes, or some not-so-trivial changes to both the KIO and Dolphin parts, to make them compatible with each other and reuse at least some of the code. Reusing code sure sounds like the better option, but I'm new to KDE development and I don't feel confident enough to estimate just how invasive and/or realistic such changes would be. So, any thoughts about these ideas? Have there maybe been discussions about this before? Would it make sense for me to look more into it and try some things, or are there bigger changes going on in KDE that would make all this obsolete? Regards, David
