Re: online content through 'external' plugin

[Michael Lawrence <lawremi gmail com>]

On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 7:07 AM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) <zeenix gmail com> wrote:

Hi Michael,

On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 4:34 PM, Michael Lawrence <mflawren fhcrc org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> First of all, great work with Rygel.

 Thanks!

> I'm working on an implementation of the MediaServer2 DBus spec to provide
> access to large online archives.

 Cool! Have you looked at grilo and rygel-grilo btw? You might have
some duplication with their stuff.

I'm aware of grilo and the bridge to rygel. Those are cool projects. My just-for-fun project is an attempt to take Python plugins from XBMC (without modification), wrapped in an environment that looks like they're running within XBMC, and exporting their contents via DBus. It actually works fairly well up to the point of Rygel recursing through their contents.
 

> The difficulty is that that the "external"
> plugin wants to recurse through all the directories, which is infeasible
> given the sprawling nature of online resources.

  First of all, If you could modify the external plugin to not
require that, I'll gladly welcome your patches. Secondly, Could you
give an example of some online source which actually provide something
that maps directly to our container concept and it provides many of
those? Don't take it as an objection please, I'm just curious. :)

There are many such examples. Consider any TV network site. They have maybe a couple dozen shows, then it's broken down by season. And then there are sites like Netflix that break movies into maybe 20 genres. The benefits of full recursion are not clear to me, especially when max_count != 0 (i.e., the result is only partial anyway).

I've already fixed a couple "bugs" in Rygel and the gupnp stack to make it interoperate with my television (LG PK750). One "fix", for example, was for gupnp to send a mime type of "text/xml" instead of "application/xml" in the HTTP headers. Of course, "application/xml" would seem more appropriate, but my TV did not like it. So there needs to be some sort of configuration file to handle these compatibility issues.
 
I can volunteer to play around with the external plugin and building the container hierarchy lazily. But it's a just-for-fun project, so nothing is guaranteed :)

Thanks again,
Michael

> Also, the max_count seems to
> always be 0,
> which does not limit the number of results.

 When browsing the containers, yes it is. That could be easily fixed.

> Could some sort of lazy model be
> adopted here, so that the entire tree does not need to be traversed
> up-front?

  Yeah sure! A quick solution would be to browse incrementally using
the 'max_count'.

--
Regards,

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
FSF member#5124
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