Re: Common music database?

["Milosz Derezynski" <internalerror gmail com>]

libmpris is a library that implements the protocol as described on:

http://bmpx.beep-media-player.org/site/MPRIS_Interfacing_Specification

which is a set of DBus methods and signals. libmpris abstracts out entirely
the DBus part for as well the client as well as the server user, so all you have to
do is to create an libmpris 'client' with the lib if you are an applet or something like that,
or a 'server', if you are player or playback daemon.

If you create a server with libmpris, your app will be automatically assigned an interface name
of "org.mpris.playernamehere", e.g. org.mpris.rhythmbox
. Hence the namespace is unique,
libmpris also provides "discoverability" of currently present players, which can be useful in an applet
where you can choose which player to control.

I'm really bad at explaining things in length, let's just sum it up with:

- It provides a simple communication protocol with the barest minimal needed stuff that media players and applets would need to communicate
- It uses DBus with the native C API to do the communciation
- It abstracts out the DBus part to the API user (of the libmpris API), that means while everything goes over DBus, you'll never get in touch with it using libmpris, except if you want to implement an MPRIS-compliant interface "natively" (as a DBus interface in your app)

It is really just a convenience library for the specification, but that's really a very relevant thing: if it's easy enough to use and doesn't incur a big depdency overhead, _AND_ doesn't require you to learn the DBus API, it's just even easier to implement.


About GNOME+DaveMcCabe: 

I discussed that with DaveMcCabeonline on IRC, and he wanted to make a spec out of it.
Now, yes, of course it's all volunteer work and whatever, but i really just think that Dave doesn't give
a nickel about it by now (the discussion i'm referring to is at least 2 months past, if not even somewhat longer),
so in that case (and actually in any other case given the long period of time), he could drop us a note here
on what the status of this is.

If you don't understand my problem: I'm not ranting about David not doing work or something.

It's just that as long as we don't know if there is some "official" work going on from GNOME's side (yeah, it might end up being not dependent
on GNOME or focused on GNOME, please let's save us this discussion, you know what i mean anyay), we are sort of "hanging in thin air",
as we don't know whether we can just proceed and make up our own spec here, or if Dave Mccabe will bust out of his cave
in a few weeks proclaiming that he has the standard now and then we're faced with 2 standards that are up against each other and have to
be evaluated........... well i'll save my words and just say ONE word instead: COMMUNICATION!

Dave, f*cking COMMUNICATE with us! This is important stuff, MAN!!

On 4/17/06, Sriram Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com > wrote:

On Mon, Apr 17, 2006 at 09:16:20PM +0200, Milosz Derezynski wrote:
> My reason for bringing this into attention has multiple reasons:
>
> Number 1:
> ------------------
>
> Dave (McCabe), what's the status of your progress of the derived spec based
> on MPRIS?

This is the first I've heard of this.  Or maybe I didn't read your previous
posts carefully enough.

> If i may speak frankly, just because "you're GNOME", you can't just go and
> say/think "well, when_ever_ we release
> our spec, people will have to follow that anyway, since we're GNOME, and the
> BMP guys are just someone". Maybe
> that's unfair and doing you unjustice and you're simply not having time for
> this, but would you in _that_ case just give
> us a small one liner note that this is the fact so someone else can work on
> this?

Well, obviously most of this stuff is volunteer so it's likely
whenever he's about to do it.  But I don't think anybody is doing
anything dictatorial here.  It's not a spec unless the major music
players like banshee, rhythmbox, and others decide to approve
the spec.

We look at people who use the db as "ISV"'s who want to be able to
create a music player in GNOME.  So I don't think we should approach
things as GNOME centric attitude and I don't think that's what is
happening here..

> It's close to trivially simple for players/apps to implement the server-side
> part using libmpris without removing their own protocol, as well as for
> clients to implement that instead of various specific interfaces.
>

Can you explain what libmpris is?

sri