[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH 0/5] Add IPFS and IPNS protocol support

[Mark Gaiser]

On Wed, Feb 2, 2022 at 1:52 PM Tomas Härdin <tjoppen at acc.umu.se> wrote:

> tis 2022-02-01 klockan 22:18 +0100 skrev Mark Gaiser:
> >
> > To give you an idea of how it looks. Kodi has so called strm (stream)
> > files. They can contain an url that can be played.
> >
> > Without this patch an ipfs file would look like this:
> >
> >
> http://localhost:8080/ipfs/QmbGtJg23skhvFmu9mJiePVByhfzu5rwo74MEkVDYAmF5T
> >
> > With this patch it becomes possible to patch kodi to accept:
> > ipfs://QmbGtJg23skhvFmu9mJiePVByhfzu5rwo74MEkVDYAmF5T
> >
> > In the former case it's gateway specific. In the latter case it's
> > gateway
> > agnostic.
> >
> > The gateway specific way has a problem. If i translate it to a
> > gateway then
> > that url i picked becomes the point to access the file.
> > If that url goes down, the file isn't playable. Even if the file
> > might
> > still be online just fine on the IPFS network.
> > Imagine you get a file from me and have ipfs running locally. I'm
> > guessing
> > you don't like to edit the file you received to fix the gateway part
> > of the
> > url, do you? I certainly don't.
>
> You translate the URLs on the fly of course, and don't store the
> translated URLs in the strm. I can almost guarantee you you will need
> to do this inside Kodi anyway. What if you want to play a playlist
> stored in IPFS?
>

I can guarantee Kodi won't need to do that translation if it's in ffmpeg.
This is because kodi passes media on to ffmpeg. If ipfs and ipns are in
it's whitelisted protocols then ffmpeg is relied upon to handle it.
It's not "exactly" working like that (there are many layers there) but it's
roughly how it works.

We are getting out of the ffmpeg scope here, but here's how I envision it
to work in kodi.
I'm quite sure it's going to work this way because I'm making the patches
for it :)

How I envision it is as follows:
1. Kodi will, somewhere in it's settings, get an option to define an IPFS
gateway. If the user specifies this, it's used.
2. ffmpeg will just honor what was set (kodi will likely pass -gateway
<url>) or will try to auto detect if nothing is given.
3. strm files will be modified to work with ipfs://<cid> url's
4. playlist files. These are tricky as they are not specific to kodi. I
will TRY to let those work if they contain ipfs://<cid>

The playlist case is a bit tricky as m3u8 (i assume you mean that) isn't a
kodi specific thing. strm is.
The eventual endgoal with regards to kodi is for ipfs:// to be a
first-class citizen and to just work. But there are lots of places in kodi
that i'll need to adjust for that to become a reality.
The first step is to get it working in the strm file and I'll go from there.



>
> /Tomas
>
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