[mythtv] [Patch] CD Monitoring subsystem

[Jim Paris]

> Maybe a system like KDE's DCOP would work even better. That way very 
> complex interactions could be made possible. Hmmmm.... my fingers are 
> itching to fire up an editor :-)

There have been a bunch of posts I've seen lately where someone wants
to be able to access so-and-so portion of MythTV from another module,
so yeah, it may be time to start thinking of a design that would allow
this.

There are a million cases:

- you have a digital camera that stores pictures (MythGallery) but can
  also take short video clips (MythVideo)
- you're browsing headlines (MythNews) and want to open up an article
  (MythBrowser)
- you're watching a DVD (MythDVD) or TV (MythTV) and want to transcode
  it to mpeg4 for your collection (MythVideo) or to mpeg2 to archive
  on DVD (MythDVD)
- you're browsing your video collection (MythVideo) or TV listings
  (MythTV) and want to cross-reference something with IMDB (MythBrowser)
- you record a concert (MythTV) and only care about the audio, so you
  want to transcode it to MP3 (MythMusic) and possibly burn it to CD
- you're watching football (MythTV) and the commentary sucks, so you'd
  rather listen to an MP3 (MythMusic) at the same time.

etc.  The possiblities are endless. :)

The problem that I see is that there's a ton of overlap.  If we want
to get pictures into MythGallery, well, we could grab them from a
camera, from a CD, from a DVD, take stills from a video clip, a screen
capture from a game, etc.  But that doesn't mean we want MythGallery,
MythDVD, MythVideo, MythTV, and MythGame to all know how to insert an
image into the gallery database.

Similarly, for someone whose digital camera takes videos, there's no
reason to have to specify yet another mplayer command line when we've
already given one to MythVideo, and you know, MythTV already includes a
perfectly good MPEG2/4 decoder and video player that supports various
output methods.

Food for thought: 

We have a list of the media we're dealing with:
   image, video, audio, web site, game, xml
And a list of sources:
   TV, camera, CD, DVD, web, radio, iTunes, caller ID, whatever
And output devices:
   TV, speakers, web stream, LCD, CD/DVD+-RW
And transformations, like transcoding, converting between types of
media, creating a DVD image, combining them together, etc.

No, I don't expect to have much spare time to code in the coming
months, but I just felt like throwing some ideas out there.  :)

-jim