Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Helping with ipod support

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 11:12:19PM +0200, Christophe Fergeau wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> With respect to iPod reading, the archive at rhythmbox-
> devel gnome org--2004/rhythmbox--main--0.9 is the most up to date to my
> knowledge. I'll probably work a bit on it soon to remove some of the HAL
> code since most of it has been integrated in gnome-vfs 2.7 so it should
> no longer be necessary to have so much HAL specific code in rhythmbox.
> 

Hi,

I haven't really looked at the HAL code in rhythmbox yet, is it in
CVS?. However, I plan to, at some point, since I want to go ahead and
add support for a lot of other players, e.g. the standard grey-market
usb storage things that can play the mp3/wma/whatever files you drop
in their directory.

To do so, I need to add a few things in HAL (properties that are list
of things, e.g. audio formats supported by the player) to do this in a
nice way. Basically I'm still inclined to write a patch to rhythmbox
that uses the HAL properties I talked about earlier, basically these

 <deviceinfo version="0.2">
   <device>
     <match key="info.bus" string="usb">
       <match key="usb.vendor_id" int="0x066f">
         <match key="usb.product_id" int="0x8000">
           <merge key="info.category" type="string">portable_audio_player</merge>
           <merge key="info.capabilities" type="string">portable_audio_player</merge>
           <merge key="portable_audio_player.output" type="string">mp3 wma</merge>
           <merge key="portable_audio_player.input" type="string">wav</merge>
           <merge key="portable_audio_player.localdb" type="bool">false</merge>
         </match>
       </match>
     </match>
   </device>
 </deviceinfo>

such that Rhythmbox can read these which gives extra information,
basically allowing you to transcode your ogg content to your mp3-only
player [1] as I wrote about earlier on this mailing list.

However, and this is my point, I can't see how the HAL integration in
gnome-vfs will help, all that code does is just another way of
querying what volumes you have on your system - and gnome-vfs doesn't
automount and the user may not run an automounting daemon, so
rhythmbox will probably still need to mount(1) the volume. [2]

I hope that you guys are interested in having support for portable
audio players this way if HAL is used. Thoughts?

Cheers,
David

[1] : OK, you'll lose some quality, but if one is really concerned
about quality (personally I can't tell the difference, but I may just
be imparaired :-), one will have his collection of music in a format
that matches one's portable audio player. And with transcoding, "It
just works" which I think is in line with the GNOME desktop :-)

[2] : Oh, and gnome-vfs gives you a nice logo for your portable music
player (if HAL has tagged the device as one), but that is, so far,
just eyecandy :-).