[MPlayer-dev-eng] Mplayer use on set-top box...

[hayward at slothmud.org]

>MPlayer has an LIRC interface, and a "STDIN" interface.  One of these may

Oops...I just found the -slave option, which does exactly what I need,
combined with unix PIPES. Sorry for asking something already in the docs.

>I'd be inclined to use mplayer on X (XVideo).  You can then open an
>ordinary X window on top of mplayer.  Make the background the chroma-key

Excellent suggestion.

>> 3) The ability to stop MPlayer, exit it all together, then come back in
>> at the exact spot we left off - this would require mplayer to save it's
>> state...
>
>Yep - I'd like that feature, too.  Perhaps you'd like to try implementing
>it for us...?

I'll see what I can do.  Lets try this on for an implementation of it:

mplayer -savestate [filename]
  The -savestate option tells mplayer to store the state of the currently
  running movie/DVD into the given filename when it is terminated before
  the program/movie is complete. If filename is not specified, it
  defaults to $HOME/.mplayer/mplayer.state.  We could also create a cmd
  that mplayer understands which saves state when you haven't provided the
  -savestate option.

It seems fairly straightforward, is this an acceptable implementation?
I'll have to dig into the mplayer code further to figure out how to get
current running_time.  Mplayer could then be started with the -ss command
reading input from that file.

The implementation is not without it's quirks - for example you switch
DVD's in the middle and use the -savestate option, then if you start
with the -ss option, it will resume the new movie at the TIME you stopped
the old movie.  The controlling program, by passing the [filename] could
figure out a way to fix this, but the "default" of mplayer.state could
instead be:  $HOME/.mplayer/mplayer.state.DVD,
             $HOME/.mplayer/mplayer.state.<FILE>, etc

If we could get a MD5SUM on the first <N> seconds of input (clean because
it helps to identify the input, bad because MPlayer would have to
save the data to generate the sum.  But then we could use
mplayer.state.MD5 - then we could do mplayer -resumestate, mplayer would
calculate the MD5SUM, then figure out where to advance to.  If no
statefile exists, it would just play from beginning.

Thanks for the help with my other questions.
-- 
Brian Hayward