ideas for next generation of media player

Hello,

I have several ideas for a next generation media player that I would
like to share. I am very interested in being a member of a team to
complete a project including these ideas as I think they are
wonderful. They are a radical change from the way that xmms currently
works but I believe that these features would be worth a rewrite from
the ground up.... xmms 2.0 perhaps? I am willing to contribute time
and code to the best of my ability but I just can not accomplish the
entire thing on my own. I'm hoping that you will agree that these
features are worth the time and effort.

The most important one is changing the way buffering works. I have
already implemented a system using extremely aggressive play-ahead
buffering, using megabytes of buffered PCM waiting to go into the
sound card. I have not been able to get this buffering system to skip
because of disk IO to date, while the current version of xmms (the
player I use all the time) will skip every once in a while with heavy
disk io. Synchronization of visual events (changing the title in the
player window, for example) becomes non-obvious but completely
workable.

The next idea is separation of input plugin and data retrieval.
Currently the mp3 and ogg plugins each have their own implementation
of http.... it would be better to have a common http library they both
use. This should be abstracted so that anything can work: mp3 or ogg
over ftp, http, etc. With another layer of on-disk caching at this
point, we can really open up some interesting opportunities, like
seeking inside network streams. If you can seek inside a previously
non-seekable stream, now you can stream things that were never
designed for it, like WAV. This could also be used to provide a Tivo
like feature of being able to seek inside a streaming music source,
very useful.

So what do you think? From what I've seen, these changes are
completely incompatible with all of xmms at the moment, but having a
player that offers these features would be very nice indeed.

Tyler Riddle