Re: [Utopia] Finding device capabilities

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Sun, 2005-04-10 at 20:28 +1000, Nicholas Gill (mythagel) wrote:
> G'Day All!
> 
> I'm writing a small program to sync a playlist on rhythmbox to a flash
> based mp3 player. (similar to how iTunes does to an iPod)

Nice. Ideally your rhythmbox patch should transcode the music so it
matches the player (e.g. some players do ogg, others do mp3, others do
AAC etc.).

> The aim is for it to run on insertion of a flash based mp3 player, if
> it's a new player, prompt the user to assign a playlist to it and sync,
> otherwise silently sync the playlist to the device.
> 
> The depends on two things, the ability to identify a specific device,
> and the ability to find out if the device mounted by gvm is an mp3
> player.

I think it makes sense to extend gvm to handle this much like gvm
handles media with photos on it as well as digital cameras.

> I'm sure i can find out how to uniquely identify the device, however i
> don't know how to determine if it is an mp3 player.

This is one of the things hal does; check out this file

 http://cvs.freedesktop.org/*checkout*/hal/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/10-usb-music-players.fdi?rev=1.2

In the future there may be UI for people submitting this kind of
information from a program such as hal-device-manager. Until then, I'll
happily take patches for extending this file.

Cheers,
David