Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] DACP (iTunes remote) support added

[Alexandre Rosenfeld <alexandre rosenfeld gmail com>]

>> * No artwork sent to iPod, although RB seems to understand the request
>> the log claims "No artwork for currently playing song" (which is wrong).
>
> It shouldn't be hard to implement this. If you're interested in
> working on it, take a look at how the status icon plugin deals with
> cover art images.

The DACP plugin will need to access both the currently playing
cover art, and also arbitrary album covers for when browsing
on the iPod/iPhone remote. We will also need to be able to
rescale (shrink) the image, and encode it as PNG to send to
the remote. Clearly it would be best to use the same library
for this as already used elsewhere in RB... I'd have to check.

The original idea was for the libdmapsharing API to receive a GDKPixbuf instance that could contain an image of any size and it would automatically be resized and sent as PNG (the libdmapsharing side was implemented using this once). But MIchael wants libdmapsharing without the gdk-pixbuf dependency, because it is supposed to run on embedded systems also. So now libdmapsharing accepts a filename for the cover. Note, however, that code has never been fully tested, so you might need some tweaking in libdmapsharing.

And you can easily use GDKPixbuf inside Rhythmbox (since it depends on it already) and then send a PNG to libdmapsharing at the right size (libdmapsharing will send the file directly to the remote, so it must be in the correct format and size).

To gather covers from Rhythmbox I think you can use the request-extra-metadata signal (http://library.gnome.org/devel/rhythmbox/unstable/RhythmDB.html#rhythmdb-entry-request-extra-metadata) for the currently playing item and any other item in the library.

Regards,

Alexandre