[vlc-devel] playlist: flat / tree separation

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Le dimanche 23 août 2009 12:27:50 Pierre d'Herbemont, vous avez écrit :
> End word, media might have sub media. We have a tree here. But that's
> at a deeper level. This would not necessarily be presented to the
> user, or not directly.

I am totally unconvinced by this argument, not to mention that it smells like 
feature bloat and never-ending intricate problems.

A media might be hierarchical but said hierarchy is READ-ONLY data, so it 
might as go to the SD or ML, rather than the playlist. By the way, a disc has 
chapters and/or titles, but is a single playlist item. In fact, a unique input 
is needed for "navigation" to work. Directories may be hierarchical, but if we 
ever want to support dynamic filesystem updates we will have to move those to 
SD infrastructure. Oh and over-engineered VLC-proprietary XSPF files are 
hierarchical, but again this is read-only tree of input item.

I mean, the sorting and randomizing problem are moot in all those cases. You 
will always first flaten those tree into the play*list*, for ordering and re-
ordering.

On a related note, media pre-parsing is best avoided (or at least cached). It 
can overload the hardware (e.g. too much I/O) thus damaging the current 
playback or general desktop experience. Also, it might waste the battery, e.g. 
if you need to spin the laser discs drive or use the network connection on.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net/