[mythtv] [mythtv-commits] Ticket #2307: Add "libvisual" support to MythMusic

[Isaac Richards]

On Monday 04 September 2006 6:09 am, Peter Stokes wrote:
> As for the 'attraction' of adding a dependency on the libvisual library I
> must confess I don't feel particularly strongly either way. I think that
> MythMusic is a fantastic part of the MythTV system, I exclusively use
> MythTV for all my TV needs and can't imagine switching back. However, I
> hope it's not too controversial a position to suggest that there is
> unlikely to be a large number of people developing music visualisation
> plugins exclusively for MythMusic. Therefore libvisual seems to me like a
> reasonable way of offering a diverse range of visualisation plugins for
> minimal development effort. I do not have any particular knowledge of the
> code involved (as highlighted in my "disclaimer") but a quick polling of
> various websites seems to suggest that libvisual is becoming more widely
> adopted?

It's really not that difficult to add new vis plugins to mythmusic, though.  
Doesn't really take much more than a couple hours, and IIRC, I spent more 
time deleting unnecessary code and otherwise cleaning up rather nasty stuff 
from goom than I did getting it to work initially.

> My reasoning for working on this patch/functionality was that I like the
> Goom plugin but my MythTV system (combined backend/frontend) struggles a
> little with it running at full screen (it's not exactly the fastest PC on
> the planet but I felt that a dual-processor AthlonMP +2800 with 2GB of RAM
> should probably be able to handle fullscreen music visualisation plugins).
> I discovered the ProjectM visualisation plugin on the internet and noticed
> that it uses OpenGL as a rendering mechanism, so I wondered if this would
> offer improved performance. I also noticed
> that libvisual support is listed in the MythMusic "Feature Wishlist" on the
> Wiki.

Heh.  That wiki page is from users, not from any of the developers.  It bears 
little resemblance to what's actually desired.  There's some very wacky stuff 
in there that's rather unlikely to be accepted. =)

> I am reluctant to make changes to the MythMusic visualisation plugin
> architecture (in order to add parameter support or some form of dynamic
> enumeration) if such changes are unlikely to be supported. If there is
> support for such functionality I'd be happy to look into it and would be
> grateful of any guidance as to how it should work.

If one vis plugin supports multiple sub-plugins (as in this case), I would 
just add them as separate VisFactory instances at runtime in 
checkVisFactories.

With libvisual, I'm mainly concerned about _it's_ additional dependencies, as 
well as it not being very actively maintained (check their dev/commits list 
archives for this year, for instance).

Isaac