[mythtv] Re: iPod & generic mp3 player support

[Steve Adeff]

On Wednesday 19 October 2005 16:18, Colin Guthrie wrote:
> Joseph A. Caputo wrote:
> > I realize your intent is to integrate the contents of the iPod into the
> > music tree (presumably so you can play directly from the iPod, or
> > manage/delete individual track on the iPod).  However, why not make a
> > first pass that just supports simple "copy to player" functionality,
> > perhaps with an option to overwrite/erase contents first?  That would
> > side-step the whole issue of the tree, and get basic mp3 player support
> > going.  For anyone with a flash-based mp3 player, this is probably
> > sufficient, as they usually don't have a large storage capacity, so
> > anything on the player would likely be a duplicate of stuff already on
> > your hard drive in your mythmusic library.  Here, I'm viewing mythmusic
> > external player support as more of just a "load 'n' go" function.  I
> > realize that with larger, hard drive-based devices like the iPod, you
> > might want expanded capabilities, but that could be "phase 2".
> >
> > Thoughts?
>
> Sounds like a good plan.
>
> I for one would welcome the ability (in future if not at the beginning)
> to resample while sync'ing to a player device.  My music is stored in a
> mix of high bitrate Ogg, high bitrate MP3 and a few FLACs thrown in for
> good measure. I've got a couple of mp3 players (my iRiver and my phone)
> and sometimes I'd like to resample my high quality tracks to low
> bitrates for use on the go with crappy headphones.
>
> I know it could take a fair amount of time to re-encode everything, but
> it could easily be an overnight job. It would hopefully be a matter of
> tying into the existing decoder/encoder framework which would mean any
> improvements made there (i.e. clustering etc.) would automatically come
> here too.
>
> I've not seen many player sync programs that can re-encode on the fly
> like this...
>
> I guess one problem may be determining whether or not to copy data back
> or whether to re-encode a file alreayd on the device because we don't
> know it originally came from Myth's higher quality original, but perhaps
> some custom tags could be written to the file to indicate it's origins etc?
>
> Just some thoughts....
>
> Col

sorry to bring up an old topic, but I just discovered libgpod (from the gtkpod 
folks), compiled it into my Amarok build and it works beautifuly, it even 
supports podcasts! I don't know what the video support for it is yet, but if 
the folks here working on iPod support might want to look into this.

www.gtkpod.org/libgpod.html

Steve