[gpodder-devel] GnomeVFS volume detector
- From: justin.forest at gmail.com (Justin Forest)
- Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2009 12:54:24 +0300
> All vfat devices?
Yes, because I have two old fs based players which are detected as
vfat volumes, not multimedia devices. I had to create some
/media/xyz/.dotfile for Rhythmbox to recognize it. I don't want
gpodder users to do this. Besides, if I want to plug in a MicroSD card
then plug it back into my mobile phone, why not? Sometimes it's much
faster than using the USB connection.
> Just vfat devices?
Yes, because I have never seen a PMP which would not use vfat, except
for old HFS iPods, which are detected specifically. If you know some,
tell me.
Also, gPodder currently only supports two types of devices with
different syncing mechanisms: fs and iPods. I don't think we need to
detect other devices specifically, if we can use them as regular fs
based devices. MTP devices aren't mounted as volumes anyway, as far as
I know.
The only reason to detect other devices using the information you
provided would be to use supported output formats, but I've seen
irrelevant values for some of my devices (e.g., audio/aac reported
when the device didn't actually support it). Also, my .fdi file that
you pointed me to says that iPods only support audio/aac, which is not
true: they support MP3s and MP4 video, too. There's no information
about video capabilities at all, so the information is both incomplete
and not reliable.
Also, even if there were ways to detect real device capabilities using
DBus or HAL, we could use them to:
- Convert audio while syncins,
- Download video in a more appropriate format (YouTube offers: flv, mp4, 3gp).
But gPodder can't do that currently. This has to be worked on, and can
be worked on separately from the capability detection process. For
example, we could use a gpodder.conf file in the root of the device to
store capabilities which the user would be asked to describe using a
dialog with check boxes, when she first plugs in the device. Actually,
I think that all syncing options should be removed from the global
gPodder config file and moved to that file stored on the device, if we
chose to actually use HAL.
I'd be glad to work more on the detection process when we can actually
use that information.
> gthumb for example looks for a DCIM folder to indicate its a
> filesystem from a digital camera.
That's one specific type of devices that gthumb works with, with a
standard fs layout. Which is not the case for gPodder.
> I don't necessarily want my 2 gig sd card from my camera
> popping up a gpodder sync request window as well as
> a gthumb request.
This is an interface problem. I added a popup dialog box because it
was the easiest way for me. Ideally there would be an unobtrusive
notification area inside gPodder, like the one you see in Firefox for
blocked popups and new extensions. I couldn't implement this because
I'm not friends with .glade guts and the current glade file is not
editable with GUI tools.
Thomas?
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