Annuncing new Project - Intone mplayer frontend

c_c cchandel at yahoo.com
Fri Feb 20 07:55:38 CET 2009


Hi,
  After trying most applications available for playing audio files on my
Neo, I came to the conclusion that the CPU usage was very high (between
30-50%). On the already distressed battery - that was very bad news.
  So, I thought, how about making an application that uses integer only
libraries (cut out the floating point stuff) in C (which uses lesser
resources)? Starting such a program quickly (well, in about 2 hrs or so)
bought me to the conclusion that mplayer already does so (using libmad for
mp3 and maybe tremor for ogg - though I'm not sure about the tremor part).

  Testing mplayer indicated that using mplayer with /dev/dsp (modprobe
snd_pcm_oss) alloes it to run with ~15% CPU usage for decoding mp3/ogg
files. All that was required was a frontend for it! I know pythm is just
that, but my Neo uses more than 30% CPU with it. It could be a minor bug -
but since my python skills are nearly non-existent (for now ;-), I decided
to see how much a C program would use.

  Well, intone - the media player in making (and it's **really** basic as of
now), uses 0% CPU (according to HTOP (all my tests are with it). mplayer, in
a separate thread uses its usual 15% or so.

  I'm using anjuta and glade for development, using fifo (named pipe) to
communicate with mplayer running as slave and gtk+ for the frontend. As I
have said before - the code is ***really*** basic. It makes a lot of
assumptions, and is right now just a demonstration program - while I get
some feedback on whether I need to put in any more time in it at all.

  To run it copy the attached binary and glade file anywhere on the Neo.
then create a plain text playlist using 'find /media/card/Music -name
"*.mp3" > playlist'. Then run the program with 'DISPLAY=:0 ./intone'.
Currently you can go the next song on the list, go to the previous song and
pause the current one. The song is not highlighted in the playlist as of
now. Will do most of the gui work by evening today.

  Please post you comments. Thanks.

http://n2.nabble.com/file/n2357414/intone intone 
http://n2.nabble.com/file/n2357414/intone.glade intone.glade 
-- 
View this message in context: http://n2.nabble.com/Annuncing-new-Project---Intone-mplayer-frontend-tp2357414p2357414.html
Sent from the Openmoko Devel mailing list archive at Nabble.com.




More information about the devel mailing list