RFC: input info

Sigmund Augdal sigmunau at stud.ntnu.no
Mon Jul 8 19:34:35 CEST 2002


Backgroud:
During it's various stages vlc gathers a lot of information about the current input. But it lacks a structured way to present this info to the user. Currently the only way to answer questions like: "what kind of file is this?" is by looking at the messages dialog, or at the terminal, where info is likly to be drowned in lots of debuging information and such. There are also cases where there are no usfull why of displaying usfull info found in the stream, like with id3 tags in mp3 files. I whould therefore propose a way for vlc to keep track of information about the current output with the intent of showing it the the user.

Proposed solution:
My proposal is that for each input, vlc maintains a list of name/value pairs ordered in categories. This could be archived by a couple of linked lists.
Like this:

struct input_info_s {
   char *         psz_name;
   char *         psz_value;
   input_info_t * p_next;
};

struct input_info_category_s {
   char *                  psz_name;
   input_info_t *          p_info;
   input_info_category_t * p_next;
};

input_thread_s should then have a member pointing to the first category of info ( i.e "general" )

Now we could make some convenience functions or macros which access modules, demuxers and decoders could use to add categories and info. Then interfaces could add a "show input info" button which should pop up and show the info (something like this: http://s253c.studby.ntnu.no/fileinfo.jpg)

Comments are welcome.


Sigmund Augdal

-- 
This is the vlc-devel mailing-list, see http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
To unsubscribe, please read http://www.videolan.org/lists.html
If you are in trouble, please contact <postmaster at videolan.org>



More information about the vlc-devel mailing list