Mediatool 0.1

A media player framework, including library, user interfaces and players

by Christian Esken (chris@magcion.prima.ruhr.de).

              Docs and up-to-date informations are available at
               http://www.prima.ruhr.de/home/magicon/mediatool

Currently available:

KMedia 0.1 A Qt based media player for KDE
CMedia 0.1 A curses based media player
libmediatool.a The mediatool library
tracker4.31 patch A patch for tracker v4.31

Intro

Mediatool is a multimedia player framework. Its main part are the media players (tracker, ...) and the player interfaces ([kc]media). So the included player interfaces are no standalone programs, they needs backend players that do the real work.

Currently there is only a version of tracker available. You must get tracker, which is available Aminet and its mirrors:

ftp://ftp.aminet.org/pub/aminet/misc/unix/tracker-4.31.tar.Z

KMedia is released under the GPL. Please read the accompanying file "COPYING" for more info on GPL.

Platform

Tested and Developed on Intel Linux 2.0.0 with QT 1.1

Compiling mediatools:

The mediatool package consists out of three parts: The library, the user interface(s) and the player program(s). You have to compile them all seperately as described in the "Compiling overview". Later detailed compiling descriptions are given. Yes, I know: "Compiling all these bits individually is a pain!". But for the time being, deal with it. Later compiling should be a single-shot compile.

        --------------- Compiling overview ----------------
        1 Compile the mediatool library
        2 Install the mediatool library (This is a MUST)
        3 Compile the user interface(s) KMedia and CMedia
        4 (Optionally) install the user interface(s)
        5 Patch tracker4.31
        6 Compile tracker4.31
        7 Test it out
        8 (Optionally) tell me what you think
        -----------------------------------------------------

Detailed descripton:

First unpack the archive(which you should've done already):

tar zxvf mediatool-x.y.tgz

See below for a working making sequence. You MUST call "make install" after compiling the library, or the media masters [kc]media will not compile! The installation directorys can be set in the corresponding Makefiles. By default everything goes below $(KDEDIR) , only cmedia will go to /usr/local/bin .

!!! You should have either the environment variables KDEDIR and QTDIR, !!! or you must edit the Makefiles and set the paths manually. !!! If you dont know what KDE is, see http://www.kde.org. For testing !!! purposes, you can just set KDEDIR=/usr/local.

-- Working making sequence -------------------------------------- cd lib
make; make install
cd ..
make; make install # If you do not have Qt, making kmedia will

# fail. Just ignore the error messagess.

Compiling tracker:

You can now compile tracker. Unpack and apply the patch, which you can find in the Slaves directory. More detailed instructions can be found there.

Bugs

Let me know if you find any. :-)

Author

KMedia, CMedia and the mediatool protocol were developed by Christian Esken. Please send comments and bug reports to me at chris@magcion.prima.ruhr.de

Credits

Ti Kan     - the author of the great Motif CD player XMCD.
             The bitmaps were "stolen" from XMCD
Yat-Nam Lo - the author of kscd, the KDE CD player. I "borrowed" his
             source code to get a start with KMedia (and C++).