[Rhythmbox-devel] Generic Media Player Support

[Michael McCabe <mccabemt clarkson edu>]

A group of students here at Clarkson University would like to implement 
generic media player support for rhythmbox.  At first we were looking at 
creating a generic nautilus view for media players, but leaned back 
towards rhythmbox because it is the de-facto media player for GNOME.

We want to make sure what we write is accepted upstream, so we had a 
question as to the architecture of such an addition.  After lots of 
debate amongst our group and looking at the rhythmbox source, we think 
there are two viable options:

1)  We write one, generic media player source that is fed by multiple 
gnome-vfs backends.  Each media player gets its own gnome-vfs module and 
feeds the pertinent info to the single media player source living in 
rhythmbox.
2)  We write a generic, abstract media player source that is then 
implemented by each media player, bypassing gnome-vfs and leaving all 
the code inside rhythmbox (or leaving them out as some kind of shared 
object file that users can then install for their specific media player).

These are fairly simplistic descriptions, but to flesh them out fully 
isn't too bad.  Which of these options (or neither?) would be most 
likely to be accepted into rhythmbox?  We feel this would be a great 
addition to rhythmbox, as it would help make the switch to Linux from 
other OSes more appealing, as more gadgetry would become supported.

All comments are extremely welcome.

Mike McCabe
Jeremy Bongio
Zack Colgan
Mike Chavoustie