[maemo-developers] passing arguments to hildon applications

[From: Andrew Daviel]

What I'm really trying to do is click on an MPEG URL in
the N810 browser and have Mplayer play the video.
Which is something I thought I'd known how to do for years -
make an entry in /etc/mailcap like
   video/mpeg; mplayer %s
or to handle a playlist, like .WVX
   video/x-ms-wvx; mplaylist %s
where mplaylist is a script "mplayer -playlist $1"

But although the Firefox microbrowser on the N810 reads /etc/mailcap
(and /home/user/.mozilla/microb/mimeTypes.rdf) it ignores them.

It seems to use entries in /etc/gnome/defaults.list to start
things like the PDF viewer, Nokia media player etc., provided there
are desktop and service files for them.

So I can add a new MIME type and have osso_notes open it by adding
a line like:
   foo/bar=hildon-osso_notes.desktop

But if I make an entry for mplayer, or mplaylist, it doesn't work.
There is no argument passed -  mplaylist starts, but does not play 
anything.

Conversely, if I try to start osso_notes or osso_pdfviewer from the 
command line, e.g.
$ osso_pdfviewer foo.pdf
as I would normally start Xpdf or Acroread, it starts up with
a blank document. Passing a --help option has no effect, either.

I presume someone decided to abandon 20 years of common Unix practice and 
do things differently. Which is somewhat annoying, to say the least.
How the ** is this supposed to work - i.e. launch mplayer from the 
browser or osso_pdfviewer from the command line ? ?

-- 
Andrew Daviel, TRIUMF, Canada