bittorrent support

[Mark Kretschmann]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 9:35 AM, Mathias Panzenböck
<grosser.meister.morti at gmx.net> wrote:
> On 04/26/2010 08:58 AM, Bart Cerneels wrote:
>> On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 17:17, Mathias Panzenböck
>> <grosser.meister.morti at gmx.net>  wrote:
>>> I thought about how one can integrate bittorrent feed support into amarok. Hard coding that
>>> .bittorrent extensions shall be opened with ktorrent is no option. Blindly executing the associated
>>> KDE applications to unknown file types is also unhandy.
>>>
>>> Maybe there should be some kind of script hook for podcasts, so that when a file was downloaded this
>>> script is called with the file name as argument, which then decides what to do with it, if anything.
>>> Then one can write a script that calls ktorrent (e.g. via dbus) and commands it to download the file
>>> (to the appropriate directory, if one can tell that to ktorrent via dbus). Also other scripts can be
>>> written, e.g. one for arureus/vuze or just to start the associated KDE application.
>>>
>>> Maybe make this script hook not just for new podcasts but for whenever the collection manager finds
>>> a new file (which don't need to be of a supported file type in order to get passed to the script)?
>>>
>>> Maybe one of:
>>> Amarok.Podcasts.unknownFiletype.connect(function(filename, mimetype) { });
>>> Amarok.Podcasts.newFile.connect(function(filename, mimetype) { });
>>> Amarok.Podcasts.newFileCallback('application/x-bittorrent', function(filename, mimetype) { });
>>> Amarok.Collection.unknownFiletype.connect(function(filename, mimetype) { });
>>> Amarok.Collection.newFile.connect(function(filename, mimetype) { });
>>> Amarok.Collection.newFileCallback('application/x-bittorrent', function(filename, mimetype) { });
>>>
>>> What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea? Is there a better idea for bittorrent integration? Or is
>>> bittorrent integration maybe not wanted in amarok?
>>>
>>>         -panzi
>>
>> Really, how many podcasts use bittorrent enclosures exclusively? Can
>> you give me 10 examples of podcast feeds that contain neither an audio
>> nor a video file and don't have an alternative feed?
>>
>> I think this is pretty useless feature creep.
>>
>> Bart
>
> I don't even listen to/know 10 podcasts! But one of them uses bittorrent and it really needs it (the
> http download alternative is very VERY slow). Yes, directly integrating bittorrent support would be
> feature creep, but extending the JavaScript API so one can do this as an extension would IMHO be
> not. Do you really think so?

I don't know, the "just delegate to scripts" approach has bitten us
before. We tried that with Transcoding in 1.x, and that was mostly a
giant failure. What we ended up with was a fragile, complicated, and
not really portable system.

Some things should be integrated properly (with a BitTorrent library,
certainly not by calling some binary), or not done at all.

-- 
Mark Kretschmann
Amarok Developer
Fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe
http://amarok.kde.org - http://www.fsfe.org