Contribution to Impress media controls

[Tomaž Vajngerl]

Hi,

On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 11:09 AM, Rémi Barraquand
<dev at remibarraquand.com> wrote:
> Hello there,
>
> I contact you as a teaching assistant from the Ensimag software engineering
> school from Grenoble, France.
> Each year, our 2nd year students are contributing to open-source projects
> (usually by groups of 4 students) like Firefox, Git. This year we are
> interested to contribute to LibreOffice, and more particularly to Impress.

Oh.. I think this is great idea!

> Many teachers, from primary schools to universities, are using presentation
> softwares as support for their lectures. While many of them are using free
> and open-source softwares like LibreOffice Impress some of them are still
> using Microsoft Office PowerPoint. After asking PowerPoint users why they
> were still using this proprietary software we found that the recurring
> answer was: “With Impress I cannot control efficiently my video and sound
> medias like I do with PowerPoint”. Indeed, a central feature for teachers,
> mostly in elementary school, is to be able to control animated media like
> short videos or sounds. In short they need to:
>
> have multiple video/audio media on the same slide,
> be able to play, pause, stop video/audio media,
> be able to go scroll back and forth the audio/video media
> choose a thumbnail for audio / poster frame for the video media
>
> Few weeks ago we posted an issue on freedesktop.org
> (https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=73065) to report this request.

I am not an active impress developer (who actually is?) but I think to
add these can be quite tricky. Maybe it is a good idea to split them
down in smaller tasks that are self-contained and prioritize them from
easier to harder. For example:
* implement play/pause video with keyboard shortcut (I guess this is easy)
* add pop-up menu item for play / pause
* implement seeking with keyboard shortcut
* functionality to grab a video thumbnail (this can be easy or tricky
- I don't know)
* show the thumbnail instead of current image
...

Anything graphical can be quite hard to implement so I would push such
things to the end.
So multiple audio/video next:
* video/audio is on pause by default
* determine position of each audio/video window an make play/pause
pop-up menu aware of this
* for convenience - ability to "play on hover"
* seeking with keyboard shortcut of the "playing" video, do nothing if
playing both.
...

If the students do it this way, they can quickly accomplish something
and it is a higher chance to get their code upstream.

> I would like this year to have a group of students to work on this ‘media
> control’ feature. For that I would like to discuss about that with the
> developer community (you guys). It would be awesome to have a referent
> developer actively involved in Impress to be in contact with the students
> and provide insights on how to address this improvement.

Maybe it would be the best if the students address the whole
development community (on IRC for simple questions or mailing list for
more complex questions).. or maybe if somebody that knows impress
better can volunteer?

> Best,
> Rémi
>
> --
> Rémi Barraquand, Phd
> VP of Engineering at Carnot-LSI
> http://remibarraquand.com

Regards, Tomaž