Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Helping with ipod support

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 03:45:40PM +0200, Christophe Fergeau wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> > I haven't really looked at the HAL code in rhythmbox yet, is it in
> > CVS?.
> 
> This should be in CVS HEAD now. What about getting it through arch
> though? ;)
> 

Yeah, good call, I just might give that a shot :-)

> >            <merge key="portable_audio_player.output" type="string">mp3 wma</merge>
> >            <merge key="portable_audio_player.input" type="string">wav</merge>
> 
> This "supported file format" list might quickly get messy :-/ Some
> players won't probably be able to play DRM'ed WMAs, the iPod AAC files
> can use either a lossy codec or a lossless one and they can have DRM.
> Moreover, a firmware update was needed to get lossless AAC support on
> the iPod (I don't even know if older iPods can support lossless AACs at
> all).

Hopefully, we can key this off vendorId, productId. In the worst case
you might need to check against the firmware partition I suppose.

> Something like what you propose will probably work most of the time, but
> I just wanted to point out that getting something theoritically perfect
> could be much more difficult ;)
> 

Indeed, and the iPod is a complex piece of equipment, unlike the many
grey-market mp3 players.

Perhaps the right balance is for Rhythmbox to contain special support
for iPods by checking other things that HAL doesn't specify through
the .fdi files. E.g. if Rhythmbox sees it's an iPod it goes and check
the firmware partition or something.

IOW, what I think that HAL should export in .fdi files should be the
richest set of information that you can key off vendorId and productId. 
Which I hope can be expressed as simple as a list of MIME types [1].

Cheers,
David

[1] : though I've had a hard time figuring out the MIME types for mp3
and wma, any hints?