[mythtv] Re: iPod & generic mp3 player support

Colin Guthrie mythtv at colin.guthr.ie
Wed Oct 19 20:18:33 UTC 2005


Joseph A. Caputo wrote:
> I realize your intent is to integrate the contents of the iPod into the 
> music tree (presumably so you can play directly from the iPod, or 
> manage/delete individual track on the iPod).  However, why not make a 
> first pass that just supports simple "copy to player" functionality, 
> perhaps with an option to overwrite/erase contents first?  That would 
> side-step the whole issue of the tree, and get basic mp3 player support 
> going.  For anyone with a flash-based mp3 player, this is probably 
> sufficient, as they usually don't have a large storage capacity, so 
> anything on the player would likely be a duplicate of stuff already on 
> your hard drive in your mythmusic library.  Here, I'm viewing mythmusic 
> external player support as more of just a "load 'n' go" function.  I 
> realize that with larger, hard drive-based devices like the iPod, you 
> might want expanded capabilities, but that could be "phase 2".
> 
> Thoughts?

Sounds like a good plan.

I for one would welcome the ability (in future if not at the beginning) 
to resample while sync'ing to a player device.  My music is stored in a 
mix of high bitrate Ogg, high bitrate MP3 and a few FLACs thrown in for 
good measure. I've got a couple of mp3 players (my iRiver and my phone) 
and sometimes I'd like to resample my high quality tracks to low 
bitrates for use on the go with crappy headphones.

I know it could take a fair amount of time to re-encode everything, but 
it could easily be an overnight job. It would hopefully be a matter of 
tying into the existing decoder/encoder framework which would mean any 
improvements made there (i.e. clustering etc.) would automatically come 
here too.

I've not seen many player sync programs that can re-encode on the fly 
like this...

I guess one problem may be determining whether or not to copy data back 
or whether to re-encode a file alreayd on the device because we don't 
know it originally came from Myth's higher quality original, but perhaps 
some custom tags could be written to the file to indicate it's origins etc?

Just some thoughts....

Col

-- 

+------------------------+
|     Colin Guthrie      |
+------------------------+
| myth(at)colin.guthr.ie |
| http://colin.guthr.ie/ |
+------------------------+


More information about the mythtv-dev mailing list