Protocol documentation updated

Hi,

I just updated my protocol documentation.  It is still a far cry from what I
want, and it is btw also lacking a good deal of information that I already
have gathered in my notes.  Sorry, it just takes time to collect, sort,
and verify the information and then to program prototypes and write the
documentation.  The good news is that I am not hitting any wall so far, so
the problem is not lack of information about the protocol but lack of time
to write it all down.

To show at what level of detail I have learned about the protocol, here some
examples of things that are now included in the documentation:

* What used to be "Playback Status A" is really the Get Recording Parameters
  call.  The "90 00" in the reply means stereo SP, and tells us at which
  encoding we get the available recording time and disc capacity that is
  returned with the disc capacity call, which is not fixed to SP stereo it
  seems, but could well return times for other encodings.

* There is a new function that equals the ">>" and "<<" button on the
  player (see "Search Audio Track", A.3.1.10).

* I have analyzed how you can do several calls to get very long disc titles
  (see "Get Disc Title", A.3.2.1).

* There has been done some fine tuning on the parameter length.  For
  example, I know for sure that track numbers are two bytes long,
  and that the Disc Capacity function returns a two-byte hour value for
  recording times up to 9999 hours.  I also know what exactly a frame is and
  which bitrates are taken for the different encodings.

Not all functions have been revised and updated in the current version of
the manual, compared to the earlier one.  I don't have a list, but it should
be obvious where the major differences are.  While I am writing the
documentation, I am also working on a reference implementation (freemd),
but that will only be made available much later.  The protocol has priority,
otherwise the interface won't be stable.

You can find the current state at
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/files/freemd_4.html

(future updates might change the chapter number, so if the above link is not
appendix A of the manual, click through the table of content or start at
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/files/freemd.html)

Thanks,
Marcus


-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' GNU      http://www.gnu.org    [email protected]
Marcus Brinkmann              The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
[email protected]
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/