Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Portable player support

[Bastiaan Van Eeckhoudt <bastiaanve gmail com>]

On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 17:05:36 +0200, David Zeuthen <david fubar dk> wrote:
> 
> On Sun, Jun 20, 2004 at 11:01:34PM +0200, Bastiaan Van Eeckhoudt wrote:
> 
> May I humbly suggest looking into using HAL for doing the detection
> part instead of putting this in rhythmbox proper? HAL more or less
> keeps a list of the devices plugged in as well as data merged from
> device information files. Such as whether a device is a portable music
> player.
> 
> Other information, such as what kind audio files the device is capable
> of playing (e.g. mp3, wma, ogg) and how to access the device
> (e.g. usb-storage or some non-standard protocol where you'd have to
> use libusb) can be included. Also, what kind of metadata that needs to
> be updated could be included here.
> 
> I rambled about all this in the thread where Bastien announced the
> iPod support using HAL to detect the device, basically the structure
> of what information we tag the device with, the portable_audio_player.*
> stuff.

I read your post. You're right, HAL would be much better to detect a
plugged in device.
I might look at this if I'm still motivated after I have it working :)

I'm already using the whole udev, dbus, hal, gnome-volume-manager
thing to get my player automounting, so I'll probably at least take a
look at it.

> 
> One of the main advantages of using HAL is that the users can download
> a simple device information file or even edit their own, and it will
> just work assuming that the device is sufficiently simple. And I think
> this is important as the market is flooded with every manufacturer and
> his brother putting out low-end flash based mp3 players that double as
> ubs key storage.
> 
> There is already work going on for adding hal support to gnome-vfs and
> it would be very easy to change this to display an icon representing
> the portable music player. Also, adding support to
> gnome-volume-manager is trivial - this would add the feature that
> rhythmbox would be automatically started when the device is plugged
> in.
> 
> Thank you,
> David
>