[vlc-devel] Can anyone tell me why this patch was done?

[Niles Bindel]

After reading all of the above, I would like to add the following:

Let me start by saying that I am very new to this code base (about a week
now), its history, and previous discussions about it so take what I'm about
to say with a grain of salt.

Looking at all of this from an outside perspective, I think that ideally the
MediaListPlayer or something similar should exist as a centralized playback
system that is used across the main VLC Media Player application, the
browser plugins, and third party applications.  It is my opinion that if
such a MediaListPlayer exists, it would absolutely need to be integrated
into the main VLC Media Player code base replacing the existing "Playlist".
This will ensure it gets proper testing and bug fixes.  Having two separate
implementations or requiring every application to develop its own playlist
playback functionality seems silly to me when there is already a very robust
and working playlist player in the core player that could be reused.

To that end, I believe the abstractions made so far seem to me to be on the
right track, with Media, MediaLists, MediaPlayer, and MediaListPlayer.  All
UI related or third party integration should be connected to the underlying
system via the MediaListPLayer.  I agree with Jean-Baptiste that the
"playlist" code is a mess.  It should simply be a list/tree of media items
to play, not a list and player.  It should not know anything about artwork.
Refactoring the current core playlist into these new core components would
greatly improve code reuse and reduce some of the complexity of these
currently intertwined systems.

As for fixing the current media list player, I think that it's probably
going to require its own thread and control system similar to what the
playlist currently has in order avoid the  deadlocks.  As such, we should
probably proceed by trying to refactor the existing playlist code into a
media list player instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.  There are
probably a lot of bug fixes and gotchas that have been remedied in the
existing playlist code that will probably be avoided by doing so.  At this
point, I'm not proposing that the media list player be integrated into the
core player, just that one is created based on the existing playlist inside
the core player.  Perhaps, integrating directly at some future date (which I
assume would be a fairly massive undertaking).

That's my 2 cents, I open this up to further discussion.

Regards,
Niles
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