nbsp & nas (was: Re: rplay bug?)

[Tobias Diedrich <ranma@example.com>]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Try changing the name of the file from "Star Ocean EX - TV Theme.mp3"
> to "Star\240Ocean\240EX\240-\240TV\240Theme.mp3".
> 
> :-)

Ah, sadly that is not a good option for all this CDs I have 8-)
I tend to create filenames without whitespaces though. :)

> rplay has never been that commonly used AFAIK, more so on (what used
> to be) high-end workstations.  You know, by people who would rename
> files so that they didn't have to escape the shell specials in them.
> 
> Spaces in file names are a function of modern GUIs.  What _I_ don't
> understand is why the long key at the bottom center of the keyboard
> isn't bound to 0xA0 in file selection dialogs....
> 
> ;-)

I knew it. We are too spoiled by evil GUIs.
As a workaround I should just hack the filesystem code to always return
underscores instead of nbsp. ;-)

I kinda liked rplay, it seems to be not as heavyweight as nas and to
have a protocol based on plain text is always nice for debugging. :-)

>     Tobias> I will have a look at nas next...
> 
> NAS is actively maintained.

That's good. I think I'll write a patch to make the logging directory 
configurable (at least I did not find an option to change that).
/usr/adm doesn't even exist on my system...

The protocol seems to be based on the X-Protocol, which doesn't make
it particulary easy to write applications for NAS IMHO, especially
since the API documentation is rather sparse.
The nice thing about that should be that audio gets redirected over
X forwarding ssh connections as well, however I did not try that yet.
Instead it seems possible to crash the Server with an ill behaved client...

I think it took me 8 hours yesterday to write a client program that works
more or less. Now the only problem is that mplayer is not working with
libaudiooss.so, so I'm having to write an nas output plugin.
Because of the mplayer design I'll have to do the NAS event loop as a
seperate thread I think. libaudiooss.so does the event loop whenever
the buffer is full (because normally /dev/dsp blocks in that case), but
that does not work with programs that use /dev/dsp in a non-blocking way.
(like mplayer). There doesn't seem to be a way to make the plugin work
without threads either, because I can't block on any of the function calls
and when I tried checking for pending events whenever a function is called
that did not work either...

-- 
Tobias							     PGP-Key: 0x9AC7E0BC
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