Re: Presets and profiles

[Adam Williamson <awilliamson mandriva com>]

On Mon, 2009-05-04 at 11:30 +0100, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller
wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> Daniel G. Taylor and myself have been working on defining a
> specification for how we want to handle things like profiles and presets
> for transcoding to various devices. The initial usecase is for devices
> you do not have attached to your computer, but we love to get feedback
> on how we might want to adjust the current specifications to work better
> for that usecase too.
> 
> There are two documents so far, the first one discussing element level
> presets using the GStreamer preset interface:
> http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/wiki/PresetDesign
> 
> The second is a device level description of the Device in XML:
> http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/wiki/DeviceProfile
> 
> Both documents will probably see quite some changes still, so please
> feel free to give feedback and suggestions.
> 
> We do hope that this stuff ends up being used beyond Arista and
> Transmageddon once it matures a bit, for instance Sound Juicer could use
> the Audio information in here for example.

There's an issue on this topic where I know what the problem is, but I
don't know what a good solution would be: what do you do about devices
where the support depends on the installed software or firmware?

Obvious example is a Windows Mobile smartphone, like mine. (But there
are other cases, I think the PSP would be one, for instance...and Nokia
phones, where you can get third party player apps that extend the
functionality, too.) As it comes from my provider, it could only handle
a limited range of audio formats (no Vorbis support, for e.g.) But now
I've installed TCPMP and the Vorbis plugin on it, it *does* support
Vorbis. And then it may come with different default software installed
if you buy it from another carrier, but as far as any kind of hardware
detection would be concerned, it'd look like the same device...

Should we just require some kind of interface layer provide this
information - as in the iPod example, where libgpod could do it based on
the device firmware? For Windows Mobile, when the device is connected in
sync mode these capabilities could theoretically be detected (as you can
tell what software's installed on the device), but not when connected in
mass storage mode. Do we set up some kind of interface for the user to
define what capabilities the device has, to cover situations like this?
Or is this just an insoluble issue? Hopefully someone smarter than me
has ideas. :)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net