Re: Perl/PHP/PostgreSQL interface

On Fri, Apr 04, 2003 at 05:35:32PM -0500, Disnard, Jon wrote:
> I duno, I've always been told that running X on a web server is not good
> to do for performance and security reasons. But if this is for your own
> personal usage then you are the buck stops with you. It better to simply
> trigger a command line mp3 decoder than one that requires X. Somehow
> seems more logical to me. ;)
> 
> -Jon

I think you guys have sold me on not relying on XMMS, because it's not
necessary; just play the music out through a command line decoder. We'll
have some kind of "playlist" mechanism - I don't want to duplicate XMMS's
capability there anyway, for example I want to remove tracks off the top
of the playlist as they're played (and log them to a "playedlist").

The machine (which is named 'jukebox' btw) is going to be in-house only -
there will be, at most, 3 other computers connecting to it.  We don't have
broadband here -- although SBC is trying to convince us it's the thing to
get -- so anytime we connect to the net, we do via dial-up.  And, for that
matter, if we do get broadband, it's not going to be handled by this
machine, and we're not putting the machine in question on the net for all
to see.  That's not the point of the exercise...

Essentially, we're activating Apache and going to all this trouble so that 
the three other computers in the house can act as remote-control units for 
the stereo.

The only graphical need I have is to be able to display the current track 
playing in big letters.  That might be enough to require me to have X, 
though. Unless I forgo that pleasure off of 'jukebox' and instead have 
something else feeding video into the TV that shows the name in big 
letters... as one possibility, I might have one of the three other 
computers sitting in a web browser, and have the name displayed there.
Using a CSS fine-tuned to a major huge point size would do the trick.

But that again means leaving a computer dedicated to displaying the track 
while another is dedicated to playing music. That seems like overkill to 
me.

Alternatively I could abandon the pleasure of having the TV tuned to the 
computer output, and do everything command-line.  I could go ahead and 
keep X for the development process (so that I can just have jukebox 
connect to itself to test the project), but when it all works I could 
disable the X server.

The amusing thing, in my opinion, is that I don't have to learn how to do
a darned thing with X or KDE if I just do all of my graphical interface
work in HTML.  That just tickles me to no end. (He says, looking at a
table piled high with O'Reilly books...)

So if I go this route: what software should I use to play the encoded
music? Assume I need MP3, OGG, WAV, and WMA capability.  (I note that
Netjuke can handle them - they don't mention WAV on
http://netjuke.sourceforge.net/ but they mention WMA, so I'm assuming WAV
is trival. But I want to drive jukebox's sound card too, not just the 
machines that jukebox will stream to.

Also I guess this means I can stop poring over XMMS plug-ins, if I won't 
be using XMMS. I'm interested in level balancing (because the music is 
coming from a wide variety of cd originals, including some not masteredso 
good) and a cross-fade feature (so there's no dead air).  So that's a 
consideration.

(And if it's already sitting in an RPM on my Red Hat Linux 8 cd-roms, 
that's a point in its favor.)

Chaz

-- 
* * Chaz Boston Baden * [email protected] * *
Orange County, California  * AOL IM: Hazel Chaz