[xine-devel] redirectors, references and playlists

[Miguel F. <mi...@ce...>]

hi folks,

as some might have noticed i started hacking xine-plugin that was
unmaintained for a long time. thanks to the help of my X11 guru, it now
does the right thing about mozilla windows and doesn't hang on stream
end :)

on my todo list for it i would like to finally solve the problem of
supporting reference urls. that stupid files we download that don't
contain the media itself, but instead a very long akamai url to grab the
stream.

we previously agreed that adding this support to engine (automatic
changing MRL with references) would be ugly since it would require the
demuxer to close/reopen the stream. also, the playlist nature of asx
files (more than one asf listed) seems to fit better as UI's job.
xine-lib would just provide code to handle simple xml like asx.

however, i'm not happy with this yet. see qt references, there is no way
to know in advance if a given mov will be a real stream or just that
stupid reference. only the demuxer will be able to tell.

i'd like to have a sort of xine-lib support to make frontend job easier
while maintaining flexibility. my idea so far is:

input level redirectors (eg. http): should be implemented at input
plugin itself. since they are the first of a chain of plugins to be
loaded (input/demuxer/decoder) there should be no problem in changing to
another MRL (even if other parts are not made aware).

demuxer level references/playlists (eg. asx, ram, mov). demuxer would
detect that current file is only a reference container. it would then
send xine events to the frontend with every embedded reference, which
should be added to frontend's playlist. next it send control buffers as
if the current MRL had just finished playing.

another win for this approach in xine-plugin case is that the same mime
type is related to both media and containers (like qt or real).

comments?

Miguel