Only a few minutes ago Ian Monroe, the creator of Dragon Player, announced at the Desktop Summit in Berlin that there will be a Dragon Player 3.

In 2004 a new video player named Codeine was presented by former Amarok rockstar Max Howell, later adopted by Ian and turned into Dragon Player 2, which has served the KDE workspace as default video player for almost 4 years now.

Today the KDE Multimedia community is proud to announce the next evolutionary stage of this simple but powerful player.

Dragon Player 3 is being created using the latest terrific technologies: Phonon’s currently evolving support for QML/Qt Quick and Qt Quick itself. The combination of these technologies allows for rapid creation of awesome looking graphical applications for media playback.

The estimated feature set of Dragon Player 3 is definitely something to long for.

As simple and easy to use as its predecessor

All the features of its predecessor

Smooth animations on startup

A more visual and more usable recently viewed display

On playback start both Video and Audio fade in, on stop they fade out

A revolutionary approach that will make it tons easier to watch a series of videos (yet to be unveiled ;))

Dragon Player 3 will earliest arrive with the KDE workspace 4.8 release, though 4.9 seems more likely.

The current development version of Dragon Player 3 is available in my scratch repository on git.kde.org. It depends on the qml branches of both Phonon and Phonon GStreamer as well as the Qt Quick Desktop Components.