[maemo-developers] passing arguments to hildon applications

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

ext Andrew Daviel wrote:
> 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.

I think Browser has some special code to handle issues related
to streamed vs. local video data as some codecs support streaming,
some only local play. ...and that's why it doesn't use mailcap.
It's just a guess though.


> 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 ? ?

Apparently PDF viewer listens only D-BUS for the new files.

Just use mime summon utility from Tuomas:
	https://bugs.maemo.org/attachment.cgi?id=687

And yes, there should be xdg-mime-utils package that provides
something like this as the standard xdg-open utility[1], I think
there's a bug about that in maemo Bugzilla...  If you find it,
please vote it.


	- Eero


[1] http://portland.freedesktop.org/xdg-utils-1.0/xdg-open.html