Hi, Michael Beal wrote: > Some of you use SPDIF for audio playback into external equipment. > Others use their 2-channel audio cards. Some have widescreen > monitors while others have 4:3 screens which do not operate at > maximum resolution. Because of these differences, there are strange > quirks in the system that need attending and demand development of a > more simplified yet standardized system.
Yes. One problem is that such settings affect a lot of parts: mplayer, xine, the gui, the mixer plugins and a lot of other stuff. For the user it is much better to set display-aspect=16:9 and speaker=2 or spdif or whatever and freevo takes care of the rest. It is not easy to add that to Freevo 1.6 or 1.7, it is a bit complicated and as you wrote, some parts are ugly hacks. On the other hand you can't strip it down to very simple settings. E.g. my sound card doesn't work out-of-the-box with mplayer in digital mode, I need to set the alsa device to use. Most people will never need such feature, but it is more than a simple toy, it is a needed feature for a very number of users. While working on 1.5 I found many problems with the current design of freevo. You have to set all this for mplayer, xine and possible other plugins. I saw the need of a generic interface and two years later now we have such interface. Freevo 2.0 is not a simple toy, I did the rewrite for a reason. The config code is more generic and should be easier for the user. > I don't feel that testing has been accomplished to the degree > required in order for Freevo to be a complete, polished multimedia > system. Depends. I guess 1.6 is tested very well. But you can never test any combination. As you wrote, some people use 2 speaker, some 4 or 6, some digital out. Some cards need to be handled a bit different. You can't test every combination, you have to rely on users testing stuff for you. >Too much time is being spent developing new toys and gadgets while >little time is going toward spiff and polish. My memory of the 1.6 code is fading, I'm using 2.0 svn far too long now, but it should be pretty stable. When starting 2.0, I did not care much about the old code, it was stable enough. Duncan took over some time ago to add new features (toys as you call it). Others started helping him adding new skins to make it work better with widescreen tv out. I'm not sure what you mean by "spiff and polish". > I am now turning toward building an autoconfiguration plugin for my > system. That is not that easy as it sounds, believe me, I tried: 1. local_conf.py is a Python file. It was a good idea years ago, but it doesn't work together with writing the config. 2. Some parts are not easy to detect, like DVB channels. This is a problem Linux needs to solve outside Freevo or other projects. There are some good ideas, maybe they already work. 3. How should an autoconfig plugin detect that my sound card needs hw=0:0 as parameter for digital out? > This, I believe, can not be accomplished on a system that is still > under extensive development as is 2.0. IMHO 2.0 is close to perfekt for this. I hope to switch the config code to kaa.config next weekend. After that, Freevo and read and write the config file, so can other external apps. > I also do not believe that a reasonable balance can be struck > between the 2.0 branch and the 1.6 branch that I am currently using. I guess that is true, 2.0 is more than just adding new stuff, it is a complete rewrite of the core. > For these reasons, I respectfully ask approval to branch the Freevo > project. Feel free to do so, this is what the GPL is for. But before doing it, take a look at 2.0 layout and maybe write a design doc what your auto config code should do and how do you think you can do it. One reason for the hacks in 1.x is that users have needs the developers did not think of in the first place. It makes no sense to fork freevo and reduce the supported hardware just for a simple design. Dischi -- You might have mail.
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