[MPlayer-users] Karaoke and MIDI in Mplayer...

[Adam Nielsen]

> > Couldn't mplayer check to see if timidity is installed, then launch that
> > to play midi files?

> No. It's a horrible ugly hack.

You could actually do it in such a way that it's not *too* bad, the way I 
wrote the XMMS plugin was only a little bit ugly.  Timidity can be used 
almost like a library - you give it the MIDI data, and it will return a 
stream of PCM samples which you can then play however you want.  It would 
certainly be cleaner if there was such a thing as "libtimidity" though (which 
shouldn't really be too hard to make, for those who are really keen on 
getting MIDI support ;-))

Just out of curiosity, if there was a nice clean solution in the form of 
libtimidity or something similar, would the developers be interested in 
adding support for it in mplayer?  (also given that it's trivial to identify 
a MIDI file, with quite possibly a 100% success rate so nothing would ever be 
wrongly identified as a MIDI file.)

Cheers,
Adam.