Developers from the KDE project have released the first version of the Plasma Media Center (PMC). Plasma Media Center is designed to be used on desktops and “any other device that is capable of running KDE”. According to the developers, PMC can be used to watch videos, to listen to music, and to browse photo collections and aims to present a user interface that is usable on traditional PCs, tablets, netbooks and TVs.
Plasma Media Center 1.0 includes functionality to browse local filesystems for media, to view photos from online sources such as Flickr and Google’s Picasa, and to create playlists from this content that can be played back in a sequence or in random order. PMC is integrated with KDE’s Desktop Search to help users access all available files on the system. The developers also point out that PMC has a plugin infrastructure that can be used to develop custom plugins.
The KDE developers have provided screenshots of the PMC user interface in a Google+ gallery and videos of the desktop and tablet user interface are also available on YouTube. More information about the Plasma Media Center is available on the KDE Community Wiki. The developers are asking for feature requests for PMC to be submitted on the KDE bug tracker.
Currently, Plasma Media Center 1.0 is only available in source code form from KDE’s code repository or the project’s download servers, but build instructions for current Fedora and Ubuntu versions are provided. The software is licensed under GPLv2.