Re: mplayerplug-in leaving zombies

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Forest Bond wrote:
> Hi Kevin,
> 
> Thanks again for your time.
> 
> On Mon, Oct 01, 2007 at 09:38:38AM -0600, Kevin DeKorte wrote:
>> Forest Bond wrote:
>>> As you may remember, my application uses the mplayer plug-in to display
>>> television channels.  I am conducting some testing where my code
>>> continuously changes the television channel on a delay loop.  The channel is
>>> changed by calling Stop(), SetURL(), and then Play().
>> might want to try calling "quit()" instead of stop. As that should kill
>> mplayer where Stop might try to pause the media. Also instead of
>> "SetURL" you might try "Open" or "filename = "tv://x" where x is your
>> channel.
> 
> Why are there so many different ways to do these things?

Compatibility with different plugins. And also how some of this stuff works.


> On the other hand, I'm not entirely clear as to why the player process is being
> killed at all.  Why not keep the slave mplayer process alive for the entire
> duration of the plugin instance's life?  That would certainly simplify some of
> the thread/process management issues, and would also result in shorter delay
> between play, stop, etc.

The main reason is this. When a media file is over in mplayer "-idle"
mode. Mplayer doesn't say that the file is over. It just quits sending
output. I've asked them to add this feature or even to add a property
that can be queried to see if the file is complete. But so far no good.

> 
> Also, I've found that things go bad when I do this:
> 
> mplayer.filename = 'foo';
> mplayer.Play();
> mplayer.filename = 'bar';
> 
> This seems to be necessary, instead:
> 
> mplayer.filename = 'foo';
> mplayer.Play();
> mplayer.Stop();
> # delay here ...
> mplayer.filename = 'bar';
> mplayer.Play();
> 

Have you tried "quit()" instead of "Stop()"? They actually do different
things.

> However, I see there is a slave command "loadfile" which allows changing the
> mplayer URL without stopping playback.  mplayer does what you would expect and
> immediately begins playing the new URL.
> 
> At the very least, it would be nice to make this feature available as a new
> portion of the API.  It would be better, of course, to simplify the API a little
> bit, too.  Do you have any strong feelings about this?

The API is derived from the various plugins we emulate. All those
methods are there for a reason.

If you would like something added, send a patch, I'll review it and most
likely include it.

Kevin

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