[maemo-developers] Python and GStreamer

[From: Austin Che]

Koen Kooi <koen at dominion.kabel.utwente.nl> wrote:

> Jesse Guardiani schreef:
>
>>>     And the related question is: given an existing program that sends
>>>     stuff out to ALSA and doesn't use gstreamer, how difficult is it
>>>     generally to port it so that it works properly?
>> 
>> No porting necessary, really. mplayer comes with a decoder called 
>> libmp3. It's not optimized for ARM or anything, and it compiles without 
>> any problems. We don't use it in Kagu for A2DP though because there is 
>> another decoder out there called ffmp3 which doesn't use floating point 
>> math, so it's a little more efficient on ARM.
>
> use libmad (-ac mad), that works great on arm and x86.

    Ok thanks. So I went ahead and ported mpd and mpg321 to maemo. In
    case anyone else wants these packages as I couldn't find them
    already out there: http://austin.mit.edu/maemo
    
    mpd uses about 10% of the cpu and mpg321 uses about 20% of the CPU
    even though they should be both using libmad. mpg321 seems to skip
    a bit just switching apps but renicing it a bit appeared to get
    rid of the skipping. I'm not sure why mpd seemed to do better in
    general. Also, for some reason, using alsa output with mpd didn't
    work (apparently segfaults) while libao output worked fine. 
    
    I'll try using mpd with glurp, mmpc, or some other client for a
    bit and see if I can get a feel for whether the battery usage is
    substantially worse than using canola. But so far, this setup with
    mpd is more like how I want my music player to be and fixes some
    of the annoyances I've had with all the other music players I've
    tried: no unnecessary scanning for new songs and no unexplainable
    errors that stop or freeze the playing of the music some of the
    time.
    
    All that is needed is a good client. glurp seems a bit
    unresponsive but mmpc isn't too bad. If anyone knows of any other
    good mpd client (there is a ridiculously large number of clients
    http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients) or one that could be easily
    ported, please let me know. I was looking at the sonata client
    which requires pygtk 2.6 and gtk 2.6 but I'm not sure if maemo
    supports these versions as I couldn't get it to install:
    http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Client:Sonata