From: Paul Louden <paulthenerd_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2009 06:08:21 -0600

Jason Voegele wrote:
> With Rockbox now supporting more than just audio file formats, including
> pictures and videos, I wanted to explore the idea of expanding the "Database"
> feature to cover those other file types too. This would allow for browsing and
> searching pictures and videos in the same way that is currently possible for
> audio files.
Videos and images require a plugin to be displayed, they aren't handled
by the existing core playback system. While video may be sometime in the
future, until that time, there isn't a codec for dealing with their
metadata either. In fact, I'm not even sure there is metadata for the
container our current supported video formats is in.

I'm also not sure I see a tangible benefit to being able to "search" for
images simply to display them on a tiny screen. A well organized
filetree should work for this most of the time.

The database is mostly a tool that helps streamline playlist generation
/ playback. With videos and images you're usually accessing a single
file, not queuing many.

Will the database can surely be made to handle both in time, I'm not
sure it's entirely worth it.
> To that end, I thought that the top level menu of
> the Database might be a listing of various categories of media. For example:
>
> Music
> Audiobooks
> Podcasts
> Pictures
> Videos
>
>

For Music / Audiobooks / Podcasts couldn't you simply use genres?
"Music" is all genres but Audiobook and Podcast. Basically, the top
level menu is already customizable.
Received on 2009-01-27