[mythtv] MTP and MSC device audio playback

[Peter Buelow]

I work for a company that has built a software stack that would make
playback from MSC and MTP audio devices in Linux/BSD and probably OSX
possible. I was perusing the wishlists, and noticed someone asking for the
ability to plug in a device, and the music tracks show up in the music
player, able to be acted on similar to how it works for local music. We can
do this with thumb drives with music folders, for MTP players like the Sony
Walkman or Creative Zen players, and Apple devices, although without DRM
capability. For Apple devices, it would probably just have to be an MSC
device instead of how we treat it, because the cables to make the Apple
device show up as an accessory instead of an MSC device are custom, a bit
expensive, and likely not something you will ever be able to purchase on the
open market. What you lose is the ability to playback DRM files on the Apple
deivce. Despite that, I think I can bring much of this work to Myth, but I
have a few questions.

1. We use DBus to do communication between the player code, and the
controlling application. This could be rewritten somewhat trivially, but I'm
not sure what the preferred mechanism for communication is. Basically,
we separated out the player from a state machine that actually does the work
with the audio device (and libMTP). It's not a lot of code, but should work
quite well with MythMusic, assuming it's possible to make the two entities
communicate.
2. We use gstreamer to actually play the audio. This dependency would be
harder to break. What does Myth use to actually playback audio? Is there a
library of some sort that I could integrate?

Sorry, simple questions, but I haven't had time recently to look into how
Myth works for audio files (at least in the last few years). My assumption
is that I can workaround the issues. However, the code is in C (I know Myth
is C++, but does that matter?), and currently not in a state that would be
quickly made ready to merge. Also, is this something that would be better as
a plugin, or directly included into MythMusic?

Thoughts, suggestions? I'm going to start tweaking this stuff to make it
more palatable to include in Myth after my move in a couple of weeks, and
would like to make it possible to include in .24 when that ships, although
that's a nice goal, but not a driver.

-- 
Pete
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