Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Detecting media player devices (was: libmtp error with USB media player using mass storage protocol)

[Jonathan Matthew <jonathan d14n org>]

On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 7:23 PM, Paul Menzel
<paulepanter users sourceforge net> wrote:
> Am Dienstag, den 25.05.2010, 21:48 +1000 schrieb Jonathan Matthew:
>> On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 6:37 PM, Paul Menzel
>> <paulepanter users sourceforge net> wrote:
>
> […]
>
>> > so I found out about media-player-info [3] and added the MP-375SD to it [4].
>>
>> Thanks for taking the time to do this. We rely on end users to add new
>> devices to media-player-info.
>
> [ I did not find a list for media-player-info (mpi), so I post it to
> this list. Are the mpi maintainers reading this list? ]
>
> I heard, that this device was usable under MS Windows right away. (But I
> am not sure if there had been any drivers installed before.) If it
> worked out of the box, than my question is, how the MS Windows Media
> Player does this.

It's probably a mixed mode MTP and USB mass storage device. It's
possible to determine whether a given USB device supports MTP (and is
therefore a media player). I don't think it's possible to determine
just by looking at it that a given USB mass storage device is a media
player.

> In the `dmesg` output [5] I noticed the following line.
>
>        [ 4846.242477] usb 1-2: Product: Audio Player
>
> Could it be, that this is kind of a standard to detect those devices?
> Could there be a simple rule be set up in media-player-info to catch
> that?

No.  That's just the USB product name. It doesn't give any information
about the media formats supported by the device, the filesystem layout
it uses, or anything else we need to know about it. Most media players
that I've seen do not use product names that contain the words 'audio'
or 'music' or 'player' or anything else we could use as a means of
identification.