iPod and generic music player support (was: Re: [mythtv] Fwd: New MythMusic Theme - 4 bins)

[Joseph A. Caputo]

On Friday 07 October 2005 2:20, Eskil Heyn Olsen wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-10-05 at 03:31 -0400, Isaac Richards wrote:
> 
> > 
> > But, development for mythmusic is good. =)
> 
> On that note ; I've got a pretty complete shoutcast decoder going, and
> started working on ipod support and then it struck me ; is doing all
> this in mythmusic going to be voided suddenly by mfd/mfe ? Should I
> focus on those two instead ?

Shouldn't really matter; if you design it cleanly/modularly, it should 
be relatively trivial to port the features from one to the other.

How are you planning on doing iPod support?  Does the iPod act like a 
regular sbp2/usb-storage device, or does it require special libraries?  
I've been thinking about this recently, because I know a lot of music 
players just present themselves as a simple mass-storage device, so to 
add support to mythmusic for these would be just a matter of adding a 
UI option in the playlist editor to "copy active playlist to <device>", 
with maybe some logic for checking available space on the target.  
However, I have an iRiver IFP player, which uses a special library to 
manage its contents (I could flash it with a usb-storage firmware 
update, but then I'd lose the ability to play OGG on it, which is why I 
bought it in the first place).  So, I was thinking maybe the most 
device-agnostic way to implement external music player support would be 
to just use external scripts that you could customize for your device.  
I suppose mass storage support could be built right in to mythmusic 
itself, with a checkbox to override and specify scripts to run instead.  
Shouldn't really be too difficult.  Thoughts?

-JAC