[MPlayer-users] Ideas about udp-sync

[Oliver Seitz]

Hi all!

UDP-sync is a great feature, and unique to MPlayer as far as I know.

Reimar has just made suggestions to improve stability against packet 
disorder, that's why I would like to add my thoughts here to discuss about.

The datagram consists of a float value in ascii representation, telling 
the position in seconds inside the file. Especially if I'm thinking to 
feed "fake" datagrams to MPlayer (which come from another program, not 
an instance of MPlayer), I might want to consider:

- Wouldn't it be more distinct to transmit the frame number? It's an 
always increasing integer, no rounding problems can occur.
- Woulnd't some ending character (<LF> or the like) make parsing easier 
for other programs?

A very nice feature would be a slave command, which could enable or 
disable udp-slave-mode on a running instance of MPlayer. Now, if a slave 
should temporarily play some other file not synced to the master, 
another instance of MPlayer must be invoked which does not listen to 
UDP. If UDP-slavemode could be temporarily disabled, the already running 
instance could be used.

Thanks for thinking about :-)

Greets,
Kiste