Re: GNOME Media Player draft

[Ali Abdin <aliabdin aucegypt edu>]

On 22 Dec 2000 18:10:21 +0100, ERDI Gergo wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Dec 2000, Gene Ragan wrote:
> 
> > I am not trying to be critical to you at all.  Instead I am trying to make a
> > call to action to everyone that cares about media support in Gnome.  It is
> > fun to define high level interfaces, but someone needs to do the heavy
> > lifting to actually define the infrastructure that these high level
> > interfaces use.  Going the route we are going now, we will have a media
> > player interface that is a hodge podge of processes and incompatible
> > libraries underneath.
> 
> The basic idea behind my proposal is to give low-level media handler
> program developers the possibility to do just that: develop low-level
> media handler programs, and then be able to instantly integrate it
> with user interfaces and other media handlers with 20-30 lines of code.
> 
> In fact, I'd love someone to start glueing SMPEG, XAnim, xmms's backend
> (actually I don't know if xmms has its backend separated, someone should
> create a libxmms and make xmms use that), and other media player systems
> to Bonobo:Media, since that would mean the user could select the user
> interface independently of the media type: right now, you have one GUI for
> XAnim (actually, several UIs), another one for SMPEG (gtv), another one
> for mp3/wav/vorbis (xmms), and so on. This is a big duplication of code,
> and a dead-end in extensibility.


There is a libxmms, but its not what you think ;) libxmms is basically a
'remote control' for controlling XMMS. Its not very useful in my
opinion. 

I looked at creating a Bonobo control that would utilize XMMS for
input/output plug-ins. I didn't get very far (due to time constraints
and other projects). Anyway, I did explore some XMMS code, but their
back-end seems to be tied in with their GUI which is not fun at all
unfortunately. 

It would be really nice if audio could recycle the use the XMMS plug-ins
(immediate support for wav/cdaudio/vorbis/mp3/mod/etc. and you would get
output for solaris/esound/OSS/(I also think somebody once wrote an aRts
plug-in for the KDE folks)). If somebody wished to do this though, they
would either have to create some sort of library within xmms for another
library to utilize, or somehow interface with the plug-in libraries
directly.

Regards,
Ali