Hello, I'm a developer of VLC Media Player [1] I've been working recently of a D-Bus [2] control interface for VLC, to permit other applications to interact with VLC. This implements basic functions such as: - playback control (Play/Pause/Next..) - information on medias (Meta-data/Length) - playlist editing (Add new elements to play) I've been looking at how other media players already implemented that, and I thought all their interfaces were highly redundant, and could benefit of implementing a single, common, shared interface. That would let developers use this interface in their programs, and let their users decide of which media player they wanna use. All about FREEDOM. A developer of bmp-x [3], Milosz Derezynski [4], already had this idea more than one year ago, so this is not very new. You can find his work, the MPRIS (Media Player Remote Interface Specification) at [5]. I've copied this specification on the videolan wiki [6], and modified it to my needs. I tried to keep it as general as possible. However this still needs more work, and comments. This is why i'm reaching you, developers of some media players, to comment what i've done or work with me, until that specification fulfills your needs, and can be used in a real world. This specification should stay as generic as possible, because media players that want to make specific methods available with D-Bus can do it through their specific interface. For example, basic methods would be available on the service org.freedesktop.MediaPlayer and VLC would make streaming methods available on the service org.videolan.vlc. So, a basic control applet for the KDE panel originally written for amarok would be able to control VLC, and a complex pygtk script would control streaming features of VLC. I'm asking you to read [6]. I strongly encourage you to edit the wiki and send me your comments. However, if D-Bus is something you're interested in but don't have time to work on, please let me know with a quick message. Thanks for taking the time to read this message, and thanks to Milosz Derezynski for his work on MPRIS, and having pushed me to work on that. [1] http://www.videolan.org/vlc [2] http://dbus.freedesktop.org [3] http://bmpx.beep-media-player.org [4] http://bmpx.beep-media-player.org/site/User:Mderezynski [5] http://bmpx.beep-media-player.org/site/MPRIS [6] http://wiki.videolan.org/index.php/DBus-spec -- Rafaël Carré
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