play_audio wanted..?

[lundman]

In the quest to be able to play music while being able to browse for more, and add to a playing list....

I have tried to get my compiled "play_audio" to work, and play music without initialising the display, but without success. I suspect I can simply not run my MRUA_dev package on a prod hardware. boo. Nor can I get "play_audio" to execute without blacking out the screen. (Although, since it freezes the whole PCH, I can't be sure which problem comes first).

With a working "play_audio", that doesn't clear the screen, i can write a wrapper program that can take files to play, and spawn "play_audio" one at a time, when a song finishes, and kill-everything when I see STOP come by the remote control input.

Would it be a worthy quest to try to convince Syabas to stick "play_audio" into "bin/"? (even though they do not need it, and assuming it can be made to play audio without changing the display)

Personally, I would prefer "gaya" could do it itself, and I would be happy to still write the wrapper for Syabas, but I do not know if they are considering it.

[gettler]

lundman Wrote:In the quest to be able to play music while being able to browse for more, and add to a playing list....

I had this working in mvpmc by giving up the display, starting mono, and then reacquiring the display. The user could then browse the menus again while the audio was playing, although mono would still react to remote key presses.

This worked reasonably well with the composite outputs, but failed horribly with HDMI. I came to the conclusion that 2 applications simply cannot have the HDMI device open at the same time. The audio and video would both cut in and out as each app stole the HDMI from the other.

Ideally Syabas would tell us how to use the audio/video libraries so we could stop using external apps like mono and have more control over the hardware. But I haven't seen any indication that they are willing to do that.

Jon

[emveepee]

Quote:I have tried to get my compiled "play_audio" to work, and play music without initialising the display, but without success. I suspect I can simply not run my MRUA_dev package on a prod hardware. boo. Nor can I get "play_audio" to execute without blacking out the screen. (Although, since it freezes the whole PCH, I can't be sure which problem comes first).

For me there's a few problem because the MRUA and DirectFB aren't compatible.

Quote:With a working "play_audio", that doesn't clear the screen, i can write a wrapper program that can take files to play, and spawn "play_audio" one at a time, when a song finishes, and kill-everything when I see STOP come by the remote control input.

I offered to write a wrapper and Syabas declined. They really don't have any desire to help user apps. I really want a play_audio that supports a named pipe.

Quote:Would it be a worthy quest to try to convince Syabas to stick "play_audio" into "bin/"? (even though they do not need it, and assuming it can be made to play audio without changing the display)

I'm hoping too, but there are some nice features in mono like playlists, mp3 tag display etc. I noticed in the last beta that osd_control from the mrua is included so maybe audio_play will make it one day.

Quote:Personally, I would prefer "gaya" could do it itself, and I would be happy to still write the wrapper for Syabas, but I do not know if they are considering it.

gaya is mrua so this is ok but this doesn't help dfb users.

Martin

[lundman]

Yeah, starting "mono", then restarting "gaya" works as a test case, but obviously not really useful. I'm surprised Syabas do not want to add fairly important features, and a little disappointed (deleted large section of complaints)

anyway, I guess at nearly no effort at on their behalf (include play_audio) I thought it might just happen..

wonder if I can fid the "prod" version of mrua

[PoPEye]

Im not really following the topic but rather replies to the non existent interest of syabas to help you out.

When doing my llink skins I got lots help from a syabas engineer replying to mail every second day. It might be that this "simple" help is ok for them but your requests are to hard from a business perspective?
If syabas/pch hasnt understood it yet, without the option for user apps and support for their advanced users, the nmt will soon be one of many others and the interest from users will die...
No one and i mean no one i've met with a PCH are happy with it as it is but rather the combination with user apps that does make it a fairly good produc.

[emveepee]

PopEye, Syabas engineers have also helped me a bit with small things too, ie how to stop mono from running from an external app, and they have usually been prompt to reply. Now there really aren't any more small things that can help.

My discussions with Syabas now have pretty much ended because their feeling is the subset of the source that was released was as far as they can go. There might be something available via the IAdvancedMediaProvider (the AMP in amp_test) but I haven't been able to get it to do anything useful.

It's frustrating because last year it sounded so promising. Not to downplay the great work that has been done so far, I guess I expected that users apps were really going to run on the NMT platform instead of being better servers that continue to use the gaya/mono model. For this DivxConnected may provide a richer API (at least for Windows users)

Martin

[emveepee]

I just was just playing with play_asf_streaming and now I really want a similar function for play_audio, there is no significant startup delay.

Here's an example for telnet, q to exit

play_asf_streaming rtsp://bandit.str.mtgradio.dgcsystems.net/bandit/?MSWMExt=.asf

Martin

[webghost]

(07-01-2008 10:26 PM)emveepee Wrote:  I just was just playing with play_asf_streaming and now I really want a similar function for play_audio, there is no significant startup delay.

Here's an example for telnet, q to exit

play_asf_streaming rtsp://bandit.str.mtgradio.dgcsystems.net/bandit/?MSWMExt=.asf

Martin

I compiled play_audio and when I run it, I too get the blank screen and the PCH stops responding to remote commands. However, my telnet session keeps running and I get a "Cannot initialize microcode 11" message. I'm guessing this has to do with loading the codec into the GPU (is that a reasonable assumption?). Has anyone else had a similar experience?

[werner]

i will try to discuss the playaudio thing on an conf call but will need two weeks because next week i am on holiday, i also think this is something important and maybe this could help us also to get an better audioplayer or am i wrong?

[Sheik Yerbouti]

(08-08-2008 07:35 PM)werner Wrote:  i will try to discuss the playaudio thing on an conf call but will need two weeks because next week i am on holiday, i also think this is something important and maybe this could help us also to get an better audioplayer or am i wrong?

I think you're right! I believe this would mean that server apps like GBPVR could keep focus while playing audio. Not having to leave the application for Mono would mean much better navigation to change/add songs in/to the playlist. The application would also know what song is being played, and could show this information in a screen saver. But emveepee and sub could probably tell you more about this.

Enjoy your holliday, Werner.

Chris

[emveepee]

The only way this will be of value for DirectFB coders is if there was a why to turn off HDMI audio in DirectFB to avoid the conflicts that I am seeing now, otherwise mono running without the -bgimg really does the same thing.

Martin

[Sheik Yerbouti]

(08-09-2008 09:03 PM)emveepee Wrote:  otherwise mono running without the -bgimg really does the same thing.

Hi Martin,

Is this with the new firmware? Because I've seen your solution in action, but that means leaving GBPVR and going back after a few seconds. That's not the same as how it's working with an MediaMVP and GBPVR.

Chris

[emveepee]

(08-10-2008 08:27 AM)Sheik Yerbouti Wrote:  

(08-09-2008 09:03 PM)emveepee Wrote:  otherwise mono running without the -bgimg really does the same thing.

Hi Martin,

Is this with the new firmware? Because I've seen your solution in action, but that means leaving GBPVR and going back after a few seconds. That's not the same as how it's working with an MediaMVP and GBPVR.

Chris

Chris this isn't new, there was the same HDMI issue with DirectFB running in the solution you saw the audio cuts in and out, probably because of contention. The mvpmc solution wouldn't be based on play_audio it would like traditional solution. If working source to play_audio could be released work around would come out.

Martin