On Tue, 2011-04-19 at 11:11 +0200, Mike Gabriel wrote:

Hi there,

on request from Heinz I have ,,dropped'' the name ,,X2goDropbox'' and
thought about a new name that does not confuse with any web service
currently offered on the internet.

What came to my mind is ,,X2go MIME box''.

Again: the MIME box is a feature in PyHoca-GUI that was originally
requested by Dick Kniep. It allows to export files from the X2go
server session to the client (uni-directional). One use case might be:
you have a server application that generates an ODS spread sheet. The
application has an export button that will copy this ODS file to the
$X2GO_MIMEBOX directory. On the client a thread watches this MIME box
and on incoming files and will open the default application for the
file's MIME type. <snip> Full speed ahead with this as part of the main x2goserver!!!!! Now that I had a chance to sit and think about this (literally ;) ), it struck me how to make this work (as I've frequently said, I'm not a developer, but I am an integrator). This is EXACTLY what we've been waiting for to solve the video problem short of an adaptive video algorithm. Here's how I see it working and what our company, Pacifera, can contribute.

It's magically simple, almost, and we have already done similar work for other features in our SimplicITy X2Go service. We create a simple server side script named LocalPlayer which merely copies a given file into the MIMEBox. The installation process copies and sets permissions for LocalPlayer and registers it as a mime-type for whatever collection of MIME types we decide we need. In fact, we can even have a related server side script named addLocalPlayerMimeType so the user can add or remove mime types.

In KDE, we assure this appears in the Open With options or we could create a separate action for it. We are comfortable doing that. We would have a harder time setting that up for Gnome or Windows (using rdesktop connections - I should explain that, in our configurations, the Windows desktops have access to the shared media directories so we could certainly do the same for the MIMEBox) but I'm sure someone could help us there. The installation script would edit the appropriate KDE/Trinity files.

Editing the Firefox / Iceweasel RDF files is a real pain and we don't fully understand them but we can take a shot at it. This would add the LocalPlayer as an option for the appropriate MIMETypes.

Whether the user is downloading from the Internet or selecting from the file manager, they can send to the LocalPlayer. If someone wanted to, they could even create a simple Qt interface to the LocalPlayer script which is little more than a file browser.

We could even make the LocalPlayer the default but that would be presumptuous but it could be offered as a configuration option.

Pacifera can do most of this work if the back end is in place.

In fact, in keeping with X2Go printing, should we call this X2Go Media Player like we have X2Go printers? Or similar to local shares, we could call it Local Media Player.

I think we can do this and it would be a huge leap forward. We already equal or exceed Citrix for performance, we are certainly less expensive (!!). This would put us close to on par with them for media handling and be a real solution until we are able to find an adaptive video algorithm solution. FULL SPEED AHEAD!! - John