DACP in Rhythmbox: Weekly Report 1

[Alexandre Rosenfeld <alexandre rosenfeld gmail com>]

Hi all,

If you are not familiar with my project, I've setup a wiki with more information: http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2010/AlexandreRosenfeld_Rhythmbox

• What have I done this week

This week's report is about two weeks of work, because I used the last week of the community bonding to study libdmapsharing, Rhythmbox and also the DACP protocol. But as soon as I understood more of them I had to start experimenting. It started as an Avahi browser for DACP shares, which went really well and really motivated me. Then I started hacking on Rhythmbox to use that DACP browser, which also went really well, I never hacked such a big project and I thought debugging would be really hard, but it was much easier then I thought. 

As I could hack both Rhythmbox and libdmapsharing I started coding more things to see how far I could get. Now I can already pair Rhythmbox with my iPhone and I already implemented the UI for inserting the passcode (it creates a new icon in Rhythmbox with the iPhone name. It leaks a whole bunch of memory when the iPhone goes away and it blocks the UI, but it is working).

I also started hacking the missing parts for the iPhone to finally recognize Rhythmbox as a valid iTunes instance.

In only two weeks I have gone much further then I originally planned. That is great because I will have more time for my exams in two weeks.

• What will I do next week?

I'll try to get some of the more hackish code into a more sane state (I'm ashamed to have used global variables to get some things working as fast as possible). Also there are a lot of memory leaks in some really simple stuff which I'm afraid to forget if I don't fix it soon. So next week is more about cleaning the code then new features. Only if I have the time I will try to implement a few new things.

• What problems did you have? What cool things did you discover that can be helpful to others?

Well, so far I've described much of what I learned and much of what I'm trying to reach in the wiki.

Bye,

Alexandre