Some thoughts on xplmedianet and how to implement

["Tony Tofts" <tony@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

If anyone has any comments/suggestions regarding the following, please let
me know.

There has to be some way for sources and clients to be tied together (as
new
sources/devices can be added by anyone)

My thoughts are:

A) There will be 3 media types M(usic), V(ideos) and P(ictures). A source
can only supply one of these media types (so there will be 3 scanners for
disk basd media - seems odd, but they can share a database and it makes
sources consistent)

B) A source will declare which media type it supplies, a friendly name for
the source (e.g. music, shoutcast), and then what options it supports (for
music this might be artist, album, track, genre, browse, query - and for
shoutcast maybe shoutcasts). Each of these sources will then be able to be
requested for a list of music (in this case)

C) A client will simply ask the core for all media it can use (e.g. rio
will
ask for M) and then the lists returned above are usd to construct the menu
layers (thinking here of the 2nd/3rd menu levels on the current xplrionet)

D) if a client selects a media it can't play (e.g. rio asks for a wav file
but doesn't support wav natively) it can then request that the core
initiate
an appropriate transcoder module to interpret the track into mp3 for
instance.

E) a source will either return a filename (if media is disked based and can
be accessed directly by the client) or it will be given a link to a module
that can supply the data (this is also how a transcoder will function)

Given the above if someone writes a new source, it can be added and will
automatically be available to all available clients.

Also, sources may or may not be loaded at boot up. E.g. the scanner sources
will load at startup, but shoutcast will only load when needed (as multiple
instances are required if multiple units are playing shoutcasts).
Transcoders will never load at startup, as they are only needed when
called.

Thoughts/comments please?

Many thanks
Tony



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