Comments on: Roadmap, etc

By: billapepper

billapepper — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 05:34:32 +0000

I appriciate your suggestion, it seemed to work much better (I also had a newer version of Songbird, so not 100% sure if the issue had been fixed) I am still really excited about this project and love watching the progress. Keep up the good work!

Nikk Folts

By: mig

mig — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 00:33:00 +0000

Hello!

While we love VLC, our plan is to create an API that can swap different media cores underneath songbird (for instance, the WMP or QT plugins).

The plugins that come from the major players tend to have very shallow APIs, so we have to model our core-swapping API after an essential subset of what is available to us.

This means issues like metadata reading need to be separated into specialized interfaces.

Also, our vlc plugin has some seriously messed up memory usage errors that aren’t apparent unless you run songbird under a debugger and see all the user breakpoints that pop. I’d be careful with it. We ourselves haven’t figured out the magical incantation to make it work properly.

Thanks very much for your comments and participation, though. We love you guys!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 20:08:55 +0000

Hello,

For M4A metadata, true, we don’t support it at the moment. Maybe it would be simpler to add support for it in VLC’s MP4 demuxer than using another external API ?

For HTTP parsing, the fact is that we force “file” access in input_Preparse to avoid “accidentally” parsing lots of HTTP streams (which can be very long). A simple fix would be stop forcing file here, and to add an argument to input_Preparse to force an access. Then, normal playlist could still force file, and you could force http (or not force anything) from your app.

We plan on extending both libvlc and the mozilla plugin to improve metadata handling, but I don’t know if it will be ready for 0.8.5. If it is not, I think we’ll merge your patch

By: mig

mig — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 05:51:12 +0000

Yah. Type *.* as the filename and it will show you the flac files. You can select and play one of them. It won’t work very well, but it will play.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 00:15:02 +0000

Sorry for the long post, I just wanted to attempt to give you a somewhat detailed explanation of what’s going on.
Bad news. When I go to File->Open, and navigate to the folder containing the FLAC and some WMA files, Songbird will only recognize the WMA files. It doesn’t see the FLAC files at all. When I try to change the type of files it’s looking at, the only option is “Media Files”. Otherwise I would just change that to *.* All Files. When I right click on the file and select Open With… and then choose Songbird from the menu, it gets hung up on it and doesn’t do anything except appear to go around in circles trying to play it. And these FLAC files have been properly encoded as they play in WMP (with proper plugin), Foobar2000, and the regular VLC media player (though admittedly with some problems in VLC. It will play for a second, sound will cut out for a half second, and then come back when it starts, and then if you skip to another part, it will do the same thing). While songbird doesn’t suffer from that problem with my lossless WMAs, it does cut off the first approximately half second. This is really more of an annoyance and your attention should probably be concentrated on other things before worrying about a half second of music. But being able to play FLAC would be great. Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions. I really appreciate it.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 22:49:19 +0000

Actually, if you point to a FLAC file with File->Open, Songbird should play it.

It’s my fault I forgot to add the flac extension to our list of extensions we scan for.

That will be fixed in 0.1.1

Sorry.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 06:22:34 +0000

I just downloaded VLC. Sadly, I’m not very experienced in VLC or just about anything without a GUI. There was an option to transcode to flac, but I’m not sure i did it right. The .flac file that came out plays fine in VLC of course, but i can’t get it to play in WMP or Foobar2000 and I don’t think songbird does it yet. The option is in the default install. I just didn’t do it right. But thanks for everything so far.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 22:31:43 +0000

Actually, I was able to play music off my 4G 40GB iPod. I used the “scan for media” option and told it to scan my iPod. The playback was a bit sketchy, and it was kinda tedious to have to delete all those tracks from my library manually when I unplugged my iPod, but it did play them. I don’t have my iPod set up as a generic storage device or anything, either.

By: mig

mig — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 10:27:06 +0000

Uhm… dunno…

Can VLC transcode to FLAC by default or do you have to go get an extension for it?

It may be that if you take VLC as part of your base install, you’ll have to download all of CDRip/Burn as an extension.

Maybe.

Those are some of the 0.3 issues we still have to discuss and resolve.

By: mig

mig — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 10:23:52 +0000

Yah, so, as the comments in the releasenotes point out, the metadata scanning loop is kinda resource hungry.

When it’s scanning over your LAN connection, it’s more like a vicious predator.

I’d suggest not trying to do anything at all while the “Scanning…” text is up.

Once all that metadata loads, the system isn’t half as crashy.