Re: GMedia ramblings...

[Sascha Ziemann <szi aibon ping de>]

Tristan Tarrant <ttarrant@suntlc.etnoteam.it> writes:

| I'm starting off with the implementation of an XMP-based module player, and
| add the others later. There will also be a generic Gnome Media Player which
| will use the widget.

I think the main problem with a media player is the synchonization. If
you want to play for example a 25 Hz interlaced Video sequence, a 100
Hz progressive sequence and 4 audio streams each with a different
sample rate, you need 6 different timer. Do you think this can be
achieved, when you use code, that never had in mind to run
synchronously with other media sources?

By the way: does anybody know how to implement n different synchronous
timers in a Unix environment?

My current idea is a FIFO based communication between two different
programs (n+2 processes):

   +--------------+ opens
   | media player | - - - - - - - - - - - - - +
   +--------------+ 
         | ^                                  |
         | | communication 
         V |                                  |
  +----------------+ forks
  | timer controll | - - - +                  |
  +----------------+       V                  V
     |   ...    |      +---------+       +----------+
     |          +----->| timer 1 |------>| player 1 |
     |          enable +---------+ timer +----------+
     | 
     |                 +---------+       +----------+
     +---------------->| timer n |------>| player n |
                enable +---------+ timer +----------+

This will work as far as there are only synthetic timers. But many
soundcards have their own timers. And it becomes really funny, when
you have two soundcards and a video card with three different hardware
timers.

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