Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Helping with ipod support

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 04:18:20PM +0200, Christophe Fergeau wrote:
> > 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].
> 
> > [1] : though I've had a hard time figuring out the MIME types for mp3
> > and wma, any hints?
> 
> Mime types just suck for media stuff... mp3 is audio/mpeg, wma would
> probably be something like video/x-msvideo. But most of the times,
> multimedia files are (mp3, vorbis, ...) bitstream embedded in a
> container (ogg, mov/quicktime, ...). And when you ask for the mime type
> of a file, you get the mime type corresponding to the container (eg
> application/x-ogg for ogg/vorbis iirc). And the mime type of the
> container is not enough to know if your mp3 player can playback the file
> or not. So using mime types will probably not be enough for "complex"
> file formats.
> 

Yikes. I knew that the MIME types sucked somewhat when it came to
media, but not this bad. Perhaps the info exported by HAL shouldn't be
MIME, but something homecooked?

It raises a few problems, that might or might not be related to
Rhythmbox, but now that I'm stealing your bandwidth anyway, I'll raise
them :-)

 1. Part of my secret agenda is to get other players to use the info
    exported by HAL as well, e.g. Amarok, Muine etc.
    (uh, please don't hit me)

 2. I want to work on sort of a gnome-device-manager thingie where
    people can actually go into a GUI and tick of what their player
    can do, in fact say "this usb-storage thing is also an mp3 player", 
    generate a .fdi file and share it with the world, community run
    databases, whatever (future stuff, but..). 
    This is useful because otherwise we won't be getting many or any
    .fdi files.

Yikes, any takes on this?

Thanks,
David