Re: [tlug] Ubuntu / EPIA / Media Player

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On Mon, 7 May 2007, Attila Kinali wrote:

> MPlayer has such an advanced playlist system, that hardly
> anyone knows about it (but always is a source of confusion for
> the unwary). You can easily build loops at different
> levels, give additional options per file or group of files,
> even different options for the same file played at different
> places in the playlist.

Indeed, if only mplayer could actually figure out where the heck it is
in a file half the time!

As an example, I have most of my CD collection (800+ CDs) ripped into
FLAC format as a single file per CD, which I particularly like because
it's relatively compact (it all fits onto a 300 GB drive) and yet
lossless.

(This, if you don't mind the space penalty, pretty much "future-proofs"
the music, since when I need more highly compressed formats for
streaming, portable players, or whatever, I can recode the original
material as I wish. Given that it took me more than a month to rip my
collection, it's nice to know I don't need to do it again.)

Unfortunately, though mplayer can play the FLAC files just fine, it
can't for the life of it figure out how to seek within them. I also
have a TOC (table of contents file) for each CD, with the start and end
points of each song, but when I give it the -ss option, it seems just
to start at a random place. The second track on XTC's _Wasp Star: Apple
Venus volume 2_ album starts at 04:17:35, yet I need to give mplayer
"-ss 22:25" on the command line in order to get it to start at that
point.

One solution to this is obvious (at least to me): write a bunch of Ruby
foo to deal with using flac to do the decoding of appropriate bits and
passing them to mplayer, and make keep playlists, it do the CDDB lookup,
and all of that as well. But that's sorta what I was trying to avoid....

> What do you mean by remote control configuration? If you
> mean lirc support, then this exists for years now.

I mean lirc support where I push a few buttons, use a wizard to train it
on the particulars of my remocon, and I'm done.

Let me emphasize that I'm not trying to say "Linux" (by which I mean
GNU/Linux of various distributions, actually) "is crap" here, because
it doesn't do this. I'd just hoped that the whole Linux thing would
have integrated packages for dealing with all of this that made it even
easier than MacOS, with fewer limitations. As it stands, it appears
it doesn't really matter whether or not I'm using Linux, NetBSD, or
Solaris; I still have to do a lot of the integration and tweaking
myself. (And I don't think that Windows or even MacOS would be much
better.) Such is life with computers, I suppose.

cjs
--
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974

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