[mythtv] New music playing module for mythtv

[Henrik (Mauritz) Johnson]

Hi, I wrote to this list a few months ago about plans to write a new 
module for playing music or alternatively doing some heavy modifications 
to the current one. I've started the work on this now, I don't really 
have anything to show yet but here are some of the points that I'm 
aiming on doing different than the current music module.

1. Use libxine for playback. This has the advantage that it can handle 
music videos as well as supporting a huge amount fileformats. I already 
have a Qt widget playing libxine stuff.

2. Since I'm the author of GlobeCom Jukebox which already handles most 
of my music playing needs, instead of reinventing this wheel this module 
is a playing frontend to the GlobeCom Jukebox. Advantages of this is 
several. First of all you have a great webbased interface to control the 
playback already finished. You have finished background ripping and 
encoding to MP3 or Lame. There is also the whole thing about really 
advanced random playing settings etc that are too complicated to list 
here. It also has supports for cover art (With automatic fetching from 
google).

3. One of the main focus is to ALWAYS keep the music playing, no matter 
what you are doing in the user interface.

4. Design the userinterface to handle huge volumes of music and make 
browsing of said music list as painless as posible. My current music 
collection is almost 8000 songs or videos (My jukebox fileserver is 
almost 3tb of disc). So for instance such silliness as scanning through 
the disc to get all the songs is not an option no matter what, not on 
startup, not anytime. I'm also designing the userinterface for use of a 
programmable remote (I use a Philips Pronto myself) so there will be 
quite a lot of keybindings and no corresponding buttons on the screen 
for them. There is precious little screen realestate as it is, why waste 
it on buttons?

That's about it. What I have so far...

1. I have most of the code to interface with the jukebox (As I've 
written that before).

2. I've written most of the theme XML file.

3. I've fixed a Xine Qt widget that gets it's songs from the jukebox 
database.

Hopefully in a few days I'll be able to cough up a screenshot.

/Mauritz