Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Generic Media Player Support

[Christophe Fergeau <teuf gnome org>]

Hi,

First thing, by "generic media player support", are you talking about 
generic support for ipod-like portable media players ? If not, please 
disregard the end of this mail, I didn't understand what it's about ;)

Michael McCabe a écrit :

> 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).

I'd go with an hybrid approach of these 2 possibilities. Given the 
current rhythmbox architecture, it's easier to use gstreamer 
gnomevfssink to playback files from "somewhere", so having a gnome-vfs 
method to read files from the media player is nice. However, gnome-vfs 
isn't really appropriate to get the list of files and metadata from a 
media player (at least for players using a database), so having specific 
code to get this info is probably better (actually this is how the ipod 
source currently work).
Imo, each media player should be handled by a small plugin providing a 
few basic functions like "get_songs", "get_playlists", ... I started to 
do some work toward that goal for the ipod source, but didn't go really 
far, so you can probably start from scratch without worrying about that ;)

Hope that helps,

Christophe