[maemo-developers] passing arguments to hildon applications

[From: Andrew Daviel]

On Tue, 27 May 2008, Eero Tamminen wrote:

> 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.

Mailcap worked since MIME was invented, in Mosaic through Netscape, 
Mozilla and Firefox 2. I have't tried Firefox 3 on my desktop (too old; I 
don't have the new libraries..). Usually streams are handled by using
a playlist file containing the stream URL, so the browser downloads the 
playlist then hands it to the helper, which starts the streaming client.
I have some ugly Perl script on my desktop to handle Quicktime, as the
playlist type and extension (MOV) are the same as for the media, but the 
other types (Windows Media, Realmedia) are distinct so it just needed a 
line of bash.

Which reminds me - I was meaning to try my voicemail from our PBX 
webserver (I use realplayer on audio/wav on my desktop), and I could not 
get the N810 tablet to play CBC Radio's live streams. I think they 
started using Windows media, and for that I need Mplayer to work.

I was looking at streaming a few months ago - Mplayer and RealPlayer will 
accept media streamed over HTTP, getting the required data rate by using 
internal buffering and doing GETs when the buffer gets empty.
For RTSP, the server needs to understand the media format in order to 
extract the required data rate etc., so certain servers will stream only 
certain kinds of media. Probably why it's not so popular compared to
HTTP, where you put anything you like online as long as you have a 
plausible content-type, or application/binary to let users download it 
and figure it out later.


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

Bah! I hate GUI file selectors ...
$ ls -t *foobar*pdf  clickclick-click cut/paste
$ xpdf latestfoobarthisweek.pdf

cf. waiting for some app to paint icons for all 2300 files in the 
current directory (or worse, some other directory) so that I can try and 
eyeball the one I want by making tiny mouse movements.. although, on the 
tablet without a proper keyboard, and with not so many files, there's 
something to be said for a GUI.

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

I built that, and it doesn't crash :-7  but it doesn't pass the file, 
either. osso_pdfviewer starts up with a blank page.


-- 
Andrew Daviel, TRIUMF, Canada