[Android-tesla-devel] Playlist support

[Sean H. <sea...@go...>]

Hey all,

Anyone who wants to try the new playlist stuff early, I've enabled it
in the source code. If you don't have a dev environment and would like
me to build you a snapshot I'll be more than happy to.

At this stage, I've got the UI activity working, and back-end support
for VLC and Amarok (1 and 2). I'm working on Rhythmbox support at the
moment, which is a little tricky because people don't always deal with
playlists in Rhythmbox - my intention is to display the tracks for the
selected album instead.

Right now, I'm having some difficulty when changing the playing
song/video in both Amarok 2 and VLC (Amarok 1.4 works OK though).
You'll notice that the current implementation steps up or down the
playlist until it finds the entry you selected, rather than setting it
immediately. I've discovered that the MPRIS specification (that these
players comply to) does not provide a means to "set" the entry. So,
I've worked-around it by incrementally calling Next() or Prev()
repeatedly until the playing track ID matches the one that was
selected in Tesla. The result is far from ideal, the process is slow,
and the player plays each track momentarily as it navigates to the
selection, which is why I decided not to include it in the last
release. I'm researching other options, and if anyone has any
suggestions I'll be grateful for the extra help!


Sean