furthur portable_audio_player namespace additions/issues

[James "Doc" Livingston]

G'day everyone,

I've started looking at better generic audio player support in
Rhythmbox, and stumbled on the portable_audio_player namespace
additions[0] that occurred a few weeks ago. I've got a couple of
comments, and one suggestion for a further addition.

[0] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2006-March/004756.html



On Tue, 2006-03-07 at 13:57:54, Gabriel Burt wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-03-07 at 14:43 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > Btw, are the output_formats and input_formats useful? IIRC they are both
> > a mixture of containers and actual encoding formats. I dunno how to fix
> > that or if it's even a problem; I'm not an expert in the audio / sound
> > domain..
>
> I think they are useful.  In Banshee we use them to decide whether we
> need to transcode files before putting them on a device.

I agree that they are useful, for the same reason. However there is one
issue I've noticed: the current .fdi files use application/ogg instead
of audio/x-vorbis.

I think using audio/x-vorbis would be better since Vorbis isn't the only
stream you can put in an ogg container, and with the current method it
isn't possible to tell what formats the device actually supports.



[re relation to portable_audio_player.playlist_format and
portable_audio_player.playlist_folder]

One other piece of information that is fairly essential to parsing
playing, is knowing what the paths/URIs are in relation to.

Most players seem to use paths in relation to the device root, so simply
appending them to the mount point works. However not all do this - for
example the Nokia 770 uses URIs prefixed with "file:///media/mmc1/".

What would be useful is something like
"portable_audio_player.playlist_entry_prefix" (string) which stores that
prefix (in any). Application would then replace this with the mount
point when loading playlists, and the reverse when saving then to a
device.


Cheers,

James "Doc" Livingston
-- 
"We're standing there pounding a dead parrot on the counter, and the
management response is to frantically swap in new counters to see if
that fixes the problem." -- Peter Gutmann