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Subject: Viewing Files With Plugins UPDATED
From: Daniel Stenberg (daniel_at_haxx.se)
Date: 2004-01-13

Ok, here's my revised version and based on the posted comments, I really think
we can implement it like this and then proceed with improvements after the
initial stab.

Viewing a File

  When a file is PLAYed, the following will be made in order to figure out
  what to do with the particular file:

  1. Internally recognized extensions (.mp3, .m3u etc) (like today)

  2. Extension config file ".rockbox/view.config". A config file lists
     extensions and what plugin (file name) that should be ran to view that
     particular file. This file is _not_ scanned at boot, but will be read
     and cached at first use. We could possibly have an option to parse it
     automaticly at boot.

  3. Check if ".rockbox/viewer/[extension]-[anything].rock" exists, and if it
     does: use that. These plugins _are not_ scanned at boot nor after USB
     disconnect.

  4. If none of the above worked, the file type is unsupported.

No Rebuild Needed

  This enables users to add, remove or replace viewers at will with no
  rebuilds at all necessary, and without Rockbox even being aware of what
  plugins that exist or not. Plugins can finally become true 3rd party
  software.

View With

  The "on play" screen can then get a "view with..." option that offers the
  user to view the currently selected file using one of the viewers present in
  the ".rockbox/viewer" directory. This would enable for example .m3u files to
  get viewed by the text viewer, or sending an mp3 file to a hex-editor etc.

View Supported

  The concept of "view supported" files changes somewhat. Internally supported
  formats are of course present, but extensions in the "view.config" are
  only supported once the file has been read and and so are extensions that
  have been "verified to work". That means we've played one successfully and
  thus there was a plugin for it in the proper dir.

Icons

  The 'view.config' file will have a field for this, see below for the file
  format. (The icon can also be provided as a separate file next to the
  plugin, as in "[extension]-[anything].icon", but this will then make it
  suffer from the same drawbaks as the "view supported" have. The icon
  file should then use the same syntax as the icon field of the view.config
  file).

view.config File Format:

  Each line conists of extension, file name and icon data.

    extension TAB] plugin file name TAB 12 icon digits 00 12 34 56 67 89

  example:

  # this is a comment line
  txt txt-viewer.rock 55 55 55 55 55 55
  rvf rvf-video.rock 5d 7f 5d 7f 5d 7f
  html html-mozilla.rock

Build System

  We would add a separate config file in the build system that makes viewer
  plugins get a suitable name for the viewer-directory when built. So that
  viewer.c becomes txt-viewer.rock and chip8.c becomes ch8-chip8.rock etc. If
  the plugin is not mentioned in this file, it would be named like today.
  (I already have work done on this that seems to mostly work.) 

-- 
 Daniel Stenberg -- http://rockbox.haxx.se/ -- http://daniel.haxx.se/

Page was last modified "Jan 10 2012" The Rockbox Crew
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