[maemo-developers] passing arguments to hildon applications

[From: Andrew Daviel]

On Tue, 27 May 2008, josh.soref at nokia.com wrote:

> Fwiw, at the present time, video/x-ms-wxv is among the "hacks". These
> "hacks" were requirements. We're hoping that some future version may
> lose some or all of these hacks. But don't hold your breath, I've been
> holding my breath for two years and only just now got a sign that maybe
> something might happen eventually.

As I recall, these "playlist" content-types such as WXV, WXA and 
Realmedia RAM are required because the browsers do not understand RTSP 
URLs. So there's a short text file containing the URL of the stream. For
a video file available via HTTP, using the playlist will let Mplayer 
stream it via HTTP, otherwise you have to wait for the entire file to 
download.

It may be a hack, but I'm not sure how you'd get around it. At one time I 
thought there was a mailcap variant that caused Netscape to pass a URL to 
the helper application rather than downloading the file and passing the 
filename. Or I guess you write a browser plugin. Personally, I prefer an 
external helper that doesn't take the browser with it when it crashes...


-- 
Andrew Daviel, TRIUMF, Canada