media players and smb

Beginner

Monday, May 9th 2005, 3:42pm

Hi all

I'm having problems for having a mediaplayer that works konqueror and though smb.
Coming from windows, I'm simply looking for a simple winamp / explorer behaviour.

I've tried several players:
xmms: it is great but does not work with smb: urls. really too bad. Isn't there a patch or a kde integration effort?

noatun: I like the winamp skin. It used to work almost fine. But I had a problem when selecting a directory. Notaun simply stops when launching a directory. I have to manually click on play.
Since I upgraded to the latest kde (base,network...), noatun now download the mp3 fie locally from smb.

amarok:
It now seems to work. The problem I have is that when a playlist is playing and I want to play another album directory, there is no 'open with amarok' action. there is only 'add to amarok playlist'
When I want to drag and drop, it only adds the songs or dir. there is no 'play it now'
I did not find how minimize the player window (very little player window like in winamp and noatun)
Another thing: it's too bad that the progress bar doesn't work with smb.
I will now use amarok I think, because it is the one that works best.

kafeine doesn't work with smb: it does complain because it doesn't find the appriate smb plugin :

Quoted

xine: cannot find input plugin for MRL [smb://PACOTEALARGUS/Documents/My%20Music/Chick%20Corea/Akoustic%20Band/01-Bessie%27s%20Blues.mp3]
xine: input plugin cannot open MRL [smb://PACOTEALARGUS/Documents/My%20Music/Chick%20Corea/Akoustic%20Band/01-Bessie%27s%20Blues.mp3]
xine: found input plugin : CIFS/SMB input plugin based on libsmbclient

kplayer media player now works with the new kde/samba packages. But it is a little poor.

xine multimedia player, kmplayer , vlc, etc.. don't work with smb.

I've seen somewhere a mediacontrol applet which I don't have in my kdeaddon package. is it normal?

Can someone help finding the right tool for simply playing songs?

Thanks

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anda_skoa

Professional

Posts: 1,273

Location: Graz, Austria

Occupation: Software Developer

2

Monday, May 9th 2005, 8:07pm

You could try working more Windows like, i.e. mounting the share and using the players on the mount point and let smbfs handle the transfer stuff.

Cheers,
_

Qt/KDE Developer
Debian User

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sophana

Beginner

Posts: 16

3

Tuesday, May 10th 2005, 1:01pm

I like the dynamic mounting feature of kio, because there are several windows computers that have music shared, and I'm not supposed to have administrative rights.
For music stored in unix, there is automount managing nfs mounts which is already setup.
Does samba have the same feature?

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anda_skoa

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Location: Graz, Austria

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4

Tuesday, May 10th 2005, 1:32pm

I think you can do that with samba as well.

From the kernel's point of view smbfs is just another filesystem.

I guess root could add SMB shares to /etc/fstab just like NFS shares and use the user,noauto flags to let you mount them on demand.

For the problems with Amarok and kio_smb, could you check if this also happens for any other remote IO slave, for example ftp?
Could be a bug but also a designed restriction.

Cheers,
_

Qt/KDE Developer
Debian User

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sophana

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Posts: 16

5

Tuesday, May 10th 2005, 1:56pm

I've tested amarok through http.
And the progress bar is also disabled.
In winamp, this is supported.

I don't know kio, but there surely is a seek api call that is not implemented in amarok.

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anda_skoa

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Location: Graz, Austria

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6

Wednesday, May 11th 2005, 2:13pm

No, seek is not provided by KIO's API

But I was referering to the different behaviour of context menus for directories.

Cheers,
_

Qt/KDE Developer
Debian User

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sophana

Beginner

Posts: 16

7

Wednesday, May 11th 2005, 5:35pm

Too bad kio does not provide seek. because most of its sub protocol (http, ftp, smb, ...) do support seek.

For the directory behaviour, it is the same for 'local' files as for remote files. there is only 'add to amarok playlist' action on directories.
How can I add an action 'play in amarok' on dirs?

For the drag n drop also, there is no 'replace playlist and play' action, even for local files.

Thanks for your help

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anda_skoa

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Posts: 1,273

Location: Graz, Austria

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8

Thursday, May 12th 2005, 4:09pm

Quoted

Originally posted by sophana
Too bad kio does not provide seek. because most of its sub protocol (http, ftp, smb, ...) do support seek.

Are you sure http supports seek?
In both directions?

Anyway, the seek capability wasn't important when the KIO API was designed, as the idea back then was that an application would transfer documents through it, not manipulate them on the remote side.

However I guess it will be added for KDE4's version of the API, due to the new
understandings of seek need.

Quoted

How can I add an action 'play in amarok' on dirs?

You could add a service menu for the directory MIME type inode/directory:
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/t…rvicemenus.html

Quoted

For the drag n drop also, there is no 'replace playlist and play' action, even for local files.

I guess this has to be handled by amaroK itself, so you could check if somebody else has already created a wishlist item for that on bugs.kde.org and file one if not.

Cheers,
_

Qt/KDE Developer
Debian User

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seb

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Location: Sydney

Occupation: Student

9

Tuesday, May 31st 2005, 3:08am

A good solution would be to write a 3 line shell script which use the dcop calls:

dcop amarok playlist clearPlaylist()
dcop amarok playlist addMedia( KURL )
(or ) dcop amarok playlist addMediaList( KURL::List )

http://www.sebruiz.net/
http://amarok.kde.org

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sophana

Beginner

Posts: 16

10

Tuesday, May 31st 2005, 10:55am

I succeeded in seting up 'play in amarok' action. thanks.

But since latest kde upgrade (kdenetwork+samba I think), playing files though smb: is totally buggy, and unusable.

I'm not sure if it is related to smb: or arts.

amarok now hangs and cannot play any file anymore. I have to log off and log back in to be able to play 1 or 2 songs until it fails again.

when I play a smb: directory, amarokapp goes into infinite loop. After I kill it, I can see that there is still network traffic going on, and kdeinit memory size keeps growing infinitely.

When I log out, memory is released, but I can still see a kdeinit process growing... (I think this is because of a session restore...)

I had to unlog again before everything goes normal.

Help welcome.

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seb

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Location: Sydney

Occupation: Student

11

Tuesday, May 31st 2005, 11:49am

well to test if arts is the culprit, test this with either xine or gstreamer.

Also, if you can provide any debug output, it would be useful.

http://www.sebruiz.net/
http://amarok.kde.org

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sophana

Beginner

Posts: 16

12

Tuesday, May 31st 2005, 1:36pm

I'm not sure if artsd is involved.
I've noticed that it has switched to gstreamer now.

I think the problem really was because of kio and smb:
I have no debug output, because I don't know how to have one.

It doesn't work right now. I have to kill lot of kio_file and kio_smb processes, and still don't work.
I've also killed "dcop amarok player transferCliArgs ..."
Still don't work. amarok does not reappear.
I'll logout/login and will try to reproduce and post some more...

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sophana

Beginner

Posts: 16

13

Tuesday, May 31st 2005, 4:50pm

kio with smb doesn't work anymore at all. ?? don't know why. (even when I kill all processes)
Please tell me what trace you may need. (and how to have them)
Maybe I should reboot, but it is difficult with a production machine in a computing cluster...
Or maybe is it a .kde dir corruption?

I now use smb4k with suid bit set on smbmount and smbunmount

works much better, and I have the seek feature.

Note: here is my amarok_play.desktop (to be added in /usr/share/apps/konqueror/)

Source code

[Desktop Entry]
ServiceTypes=audio/midi,audio/mid,audio/mpegurl,audio/wav,audio/x-wav,audio/aiff,audio/x-aiff,audio/x-mid,audio/x-midi,audio/x-mp3,audio/mp3,audio/x-mpeg-url,application/ogg,inode/directory,audio/x-mpegurl
Actions=Play;

[Desktop Action Play]
Name=Play in amaroK
Name[fr]=Jouer dans amaroK
Icon=amarok
Exec=amarok %U

This post has been edited 1 times, last edit by "sophana" (May 31st 2005, 5:00pm)

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sophana

Beginner

Posts: 16

14

Wednesday, June 1st 2005, 4:46pm

amaroK: [Loader] Starting amarokapp..
amaroK: [Loader] Don't run gdb, valgrind, etc. against this binary! Use amarokapp.
DCOPClient::attachInternal. Attach failed Could not open network socket
amaroK: [Loader] amaroK is taking a long time to load! Perhaps something has gone wrong?

I have about 40-50 kio_http process. I don't why because I don't make http accesses...
Can't kill -9 the amarokapp defunct...
I'm going to switch back to notaun...

Help welcome

[sophana@hypotenus ~]$ ps -ef | grep amarok
sophana 5746 1 4 11:31 ? 00:18:23 [amarokapp <defunct>]
sophana 5780 1884 0 11:31 ? 00:00:00 kdeinit: kio_http http /tmp/ksocket-sophana/klauncherJkn21b.slave-socket /tmp/ksocket-sophana/amarok1tzpKa.slave-socket
sophana 8023 1884 0 11:40 ? 00:00:00 kdeinit: kio_http http /tmp/ksocket-sophana/klauncherJkn21b.slave-socket /tmp/ksocket-sophana/amarokvhve9b.slave-socket
sophana 14073 1884 0 12:07 ? 00:00:00 kdeinit: kio_http http /tmp/ksocket-sophana/klauncherJkn21b.slave-socket /tmp/ksocket-sophana/amarokBwv3oc.slave-socket
sophana 15619 1884 0 12:15 ? 00:00:00 kdeinit: kio_http http /tmp/ksocket-sophana/klauncherJkn21b.slave-socket /tmp/ksocket-sophana/amarokqgxdNa.slave-socket
sophana 17213 1884 0 12:21 ? 00:00:00 kdeinit: kio_http http /tmp/ksocket-sophana/klauncherJkn21b.slave-socket /tmp/ksocket-sophana/amarok5uvwOb.slave-socket
sophana 17898 1884 0 12:24 ? 00:00:00 kdeinit: kio_http http /tmp/ksocket-sophana/klauncherJkn21b.slave-socket /tmp/ksocket-sophana/amarok4fMpRb.slave-socket
sophana 18582 1884 0 12:28 ? 00:00:00 kdeinit: kio_http http /tmp/ksocket-sophana/klauncherJkn21b.slave-socket /tmp/ksocket-sophana/amarokOw55Oa.slave-socket
sophana 19349 1884 0 12:32 ? 00:00:00 kdeinit: kio_http http /tmp/ksocket-sophana/klauncherJkn21b.slave-socket /tmp/ksocket-sophana/amarok9k3j2b.slave-socket

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sophana

Beginner

Posts: 16

15

Wednesday, June 15th 2005, 11:59am

I think I found the final solution. I'm using back xmms (with arts) and the xmms-kde panel applet (on sourceforge). It does everything I want except for smb browsing. For that, I use smb4k which is setuid.

I still have to add the 'enqueue in xmms' action in konquerror.

All other solutions are NOT reliable or not functionnal. Still hard to believe.

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