Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] monkey-media future

[Colin Walters <walters rhythmbox org>]

On Sat, 2003-08-02 at 08:18, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:

> For reading, I had started on media-info, a library which I was
> developing in nautilus-media, and which is going to get folded back to
> gst-plugins when I'm happy with it.  I need to pick it up again soon,
> lots of people have started asking how to do this.

Cool.

> The features would be caching of media info (if it's in the cache, then
> return info from the cache, instead of reading the file, which would be
> very fast when loading lots of files), multiple lookups of properties
> (ie, "here are all the files, get me all the artists and titles"), which
> would allow it to be really quick at doing big sets too.

Rhythmbox already caches media info in the node system, so I'd at least
want a way to turn this off.

> As for writing, this is harder.  I know Company (Benjamin) is working on
> his own implementation.  He put in some fixes in his local branch (0.7
> though) that allowed him to transcode with metadata preservation.
> 
> Writing itself shouldn't be too hard, and even possible within
> GStreamer, even though for some formats it basically means "copy whole
> file and add on the fly".

Yeah.  Writing metadata is the big thing that I really want.  It's a
very user-visible lack in Rhythmbox.  

> Retagging is slightly harder, but should still be doable. It just needs
> to get done.
> 
> So, it depends on which of these you need.  For rhythmbox, I would think
> you only need reading and retagging, not writing and preserving.
> 
> What do you guys think/need ?

Really, what I care about is having a media framework that
1) Is based primarily on GStreamer (support for other systems is fine too)
2) Supports gnome-vfs pervasively
3) Supports metadata reading/writing

And that's about it.  Sharing code is a good goal too, but if something
doesn't really meet the above three criteria, I am not so interested.