Re: MLQ (Media Library Query) file format and mime type proposal

["Milosz Derezynski" <internalerror gmail com>]

Yeah well just to stay within the focus of a music library, there has to be something
that does the resolution.

ONE possible option would be to specify a D-BUS interface name, and a have simple launcher.

All apps supporting MLQs would have to have a minimal common subset
of D-BUS interfacery to allow this kind of query to be sent to them in some way
(something like an AddUri call might just suffice), then the launcher would basically
consist of starting the relevant apllication trough D-BUS activation, and then pass on
the actual query to it. 

(We have a dummy method "Startup" on our D-BUS iface which
does nothing, but causes D-BUS to start up BMP. The reasoning is that we have one main
binary and one "remote" binary, which is though set so that it is perceived as being the main
binary, as in it's in /usr/bin, whereas the -bin (main) binary is in /usr/libexec. The reason
is so that we have a lightweight remote app that can perform actions on the main binary
and don't have to have the main app be capable of being a client to it's own server
and have all the startup shizzle going just to perform a certain remote operation).

For example you'd have:
query://org.beepmediaplayer.bmp/?artist=Air&Album=Moon%20Safari

The script, or be it a binary, let's call it "play-mlq", would launch the
player with the specified interface and pass it the actual query.

_Another_ possibility, although this would require players that can work with
mutable playlists like BMP, is that it would pass the query on to 
e.g. something
like Tracker or some other indexer, which would then execute the query and
_IT_ would then start the player specified by the interface and pass it along the
resulting URIs.

-- Milosz

On 6/22/06, Josef Spillner <spillner kde org> wrote:

Alle 11:25, giovedì, 22. giugno 2006, Milosz Derezynski ha scritto:
> Since this is very common, and having the discussions about a common music
> database in mind, this seems like a useful proposal, since it is not player
> specific.

It is not even music specific. I've used query:// URIs for a long time with
metaservers, although only in a read-only context, whereas for write access
the (alternative) full-blown XML interface is used.

The way it is used for the metaserver is like query://type/category, where
e.g. type would be the generic name for a server (say, 'freeciv' or 'cupsd')
and category would be 'connection' (to get back a connection URI) or 'meta'
(to get back other metaserver URIs for the same type).
Using such a scheme makes an application resistant against host name changes
in the long run, i.e. it will pick up moving servers automatically.

This is probably not the same thing as your query, but obviously it's also
used to query a database behind it (which is a XML database in my case, but
could be SQL or anything else for that matter). So maybe it makes sense to
standardise this in a broader context.

KDE Radio Station is one example where this is used (ha - found a relation to
music!), and the GGZ Gaming Zone project is another one (where it originated
since metaservers are commonplace with game servers).

Josef
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