[Rhythmbox-devel] Checking remote files

[GCZ <geeceezee free fr>]

Hi,

I wonder how remote files are handled when added to the library.

I've written a small PHP script that encodes any music file (flac, mp3 
or ogg) into an Ogg Vorbis stream, on demand. If I tell a music player 
(xmms, for instance) to play http://stream.example.net/flac/Coolio.ogg,
my web server calls /index.php?file=flac/Coolio.ogg (via URL rewriting, 
without redirection), the PHP script finds the real file with that name 
but with any extension (could be Coolio.flac, Coolio.mp3 or Coolio.ogg), 
encodes it into an Ogg Vorbis stream and then outputs it as it goes.

It works fine with players like xmms and mplayer, but not with 
rhythmbox. When the URL is added to the library, I guess some kind of 
checking is done, and probably because the stream is encoded on demand, 
rhythmbox waits until the entire song has been encoded to add it to the 
library. The added entry shows "<invalid filename>" as title. When I 
want to play it, it causes the stream to be fully re-encoded once more, 
and then plays it. The same goes when rhythmbox is run later: it causes 
the stream to be re-encoded while it checks the contents of rhythmdb.xml.

Would it be possible to disable such checking, if that is indeed the 
issue here? Or is there simply a better way of implementing on-demand 
streams?

GCZ