Read Me

 xtreacker: mount streams as files
 Copyright (C) 2010 azslow3

 This program can be distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL.
 See the file COPYING.


WARNING: the program is at early development. Do not use it
  in "production" environment.

WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT?

Xtreacker is a FUSE based filesystem which uses output of some
command as the content of some file. Several such filesystems 
are already available and have far more muture state. So, why
jet another?

Unlike other systems, Xtreacker assume that the content is a
(potentially endless) stream. It also make this content usable
for media players.

The name comes from hardware media player for which it was
developed, Xtreamer. That is XTREAmer triCKER.

While Xtreamer supports near all modern contents, it is
at the moment is not able to process streams from the network,
while can play local and remote files. Xtreacker make it think
that the stream is "just a file", so Xtreamer has no problems
with processing it.

What makes streams so different from files? They are endless,
the content can not be "reloaded" and some of them (Online TV)
are transfered with the speed of the stream (slow). File
oriented alternatives assumes that the source has fixed source,
can be downloaded fast and can be "rewind" if required.

In addition, Xtreamer required some additional "trick": it
checks the access speed first, which fails for "slow" content.

REQUIREMENTS:

Xtreacker can run on Linux based system. It was developed
on x86_64 Ubuntu platform and was tested on ARM based plateform.

The only requirement is working FUSE. That includes FUSE kernel
module (separate or build into kernel) and libfuse library.
For compilation, it also required include files of libfuse.


At run time it need some "stream provider" application.
Xtreamer was tested with mplayer in "--dumpstream" mode, but
there was reports that wget and even cat (for testing) are
working fine as well.

INSTALLATION:

./configure && make && make install

Note, that currently log file path is hardcoded into the source
and is "/var/log/xtreacker.log".

RUN:

xtreacker --flist=<conf_file_name> [-d] [-o fuse_parameters] <mount point>

Where:
-d - is specified, leave the program in foreground and produce extra
     debugging information to the standard output.
<mount point> - is a directory where the "files" will be visible
-o parameters - standard FUSE parameters, most usefull is "allow_other",
     required if you run xtreacker as root and access as normal user. 
<conf_file_name> - the name of configuration file with format:

#XTFL1
# Comment lines started with '#'
file1.ext stream command to run with parameters which produce %out
"Dirname" ldir full_path_to_flist_file_for_this_directory
DynDir    dir  command which output flist file into %out

Note, "#XTFL1" must be present as the first line, verbatim.
"File name.ext" will be the file name visible in the system. It should
be quoted in case it contains spaces.
The number (second token) is not really used...
The command should stream the content into named pipe "%out". "%out" will
be substituted by real pipe name at run time.


Example:
#XTFL1
file.wmv  stream mplayer --dumpstream --dumpfile %out http://online.tv.url
file2.wmv stream mplayer --dumpstream --dumpfile %out my_video.wmv
file3.mpeg stream wget http://video.unicast.url -O %out