[ANN] FMPS v1.0 and the "FMPS Alliance"

[Jeff Mitchell]

Greetings,

I'd like to announce the release of v1.0 of FMPS, found at
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/free-media-player-specs.
I want to thank those that contributed to helping define it and make it
something that should be very workable.

The specification stays away from mandating specific values, instead
letting applications decide for themselves the explicit names of the
tags. This is good, as it means applications can do things their own way
and not have a worry of stepping on another application's (and thus
user's) data.

However, I believe that there are some significant gains to be realized
by collaborating on some of the more common value types. We have pretty
good representation; Amarok, Ampache, Banshee, Quod Libet, Songbird,
VideoLAN, XMMS2, and Youki have at some point all pledged support.

That being said, I'd also like to announce/suggest creation of a "FMPS
Alliance", for lack of a better name, whose goal is simply to decide on
some standard attribute names, algorithms, etc. for those players that
want to opt-in. (For players that do not wish to opt-in, the spec is
still very usable and interoperability will still be achieved on
playcounts and ratings.)

It doesn't need to be much or take up too much of everyone's time; some
discussion on xdg at l.f.o or a separate list and values on a wiki page on
fd.o should suffice.

I'll poke people on the relevant projects and see if there's enough
interest in the idea; if people like it, I'll work out the details and
post a secondary announcement here.

Thanks,
Jeff

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 196 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/attachments/20100909/ebd155a6/attachment.pgp>