Still Alive!

Has Portal been out for too long for that title to still be relevant? Oh well, it fits this post so I'm using it anyway.

I've finally started on a QT 4 port of QUI for MPlayer because the QT 3 version no longer runs on my Gentoo system, and since I still haven't found a frontend that I like better for general multimedia playing than my own (shocking, I know) I need an updated version. Because the old code was...charitably...awful, and it was not clear to me how difficult it would be to do a straight port to QT 4, I'm doing the thing I've criticized the KDE people for and starting from scratch. Not only that, but I'm moving to Python so I'm pretty much throwing out all of the old code.

There are a couple of reasons for this - Python is well-suited to a project like this and I like it. I've also done some MEncoder work in Python since QUI started, so I do actually have some code to borrow from (and once I get that ported to QT 4 I'll post it to the subversion repo). I'm also going to be making some significant UI changes based on my usage of QUI over the past 7 or so years. Things that didn't prove necessary will be going away and everything will be getting reorganized to eliminate that ugly separate playlist window from the old QUI. Hopefully it will be a big aesthetic and functional improvement.

The current status of the QUI 2.0 (hey, I knew there was a reason I never released that!) is that it is able to have files drag-n-dropped to the playlist and then play straight through those files. That's pretty much all it can do right now so it's not especially usable, but it's a start. Watch this space for updates as they will doubtless be coming fast and furious over the next couple of weeks.