[MPRIS] "TimeFocused" property?

[Bastien Nocera]

Hey,

And sorry for bringing that up so long afterwards. I found 20-odd
Flatpak'ed applications in Flathub that talked directly to
org.gnome.SettingsDaemon, and we thought that, longer term, migrating
all those apps to MPRIS might be a good idea.

On Mon, 2014-03-17 at 14:44 +0000, Alex Merry wrote:
<snip>
> The mpris2 engine for the KDE Plasma desktop uses a heuristic that
> picks
> a playing media player, or else a paused one, or else a stopped one,
> and
> tries to keep a consistent player subject to those constraints.
> 
> Now, we could add a property to the root interface that indicated
> that
> last time a user interacted with the media player for this sort of
> multiplexing, but there would have to be some decision about what
> constituted an "interaction".  Should it be any interaction?  If you
> have mpd playing some music, and want to inspect a playlist in
> another
> media application, should that cause the active player to change?  Is
> focussing an application enough, or should it be proper interaction,
> or
> should it be something like queuing up a track?
> 
> This is something where I'd rather not leave the decision to the
> media
> players themselves; it should either be determined by the spec or
> (somehow) by the client.

I don't think that "interaction" is what we want. In GNOME's media-
keys, we already expect clients to poke the daemon when their windows
get focused.

This works well for allowing graphical applications to each get some
control over where the keys get sent (say, pause music player, launch
video player, control video player with media keys, exit video player,
music player gets controlled by media keys again).

Applications which don't have a window wouldn't have this property, or
they would have 0, and the keys would only get sent if no other
applications was there.

This property is necessary to make the MPRIS integration in GNOME to
the same level as GNOME's MediaKeys interface, and would allow us to
phase out the MediaKeys interface in favour of MPRIS support.

Cheers