seanadams wrote:

> This is about the same as complaining that you can't "scratch" on a CD
> player the same way you could on last century's phonograph...

Hi Sean,

Thanks for your great summary of how ff/rw work differently between CD and
tape deck. It is clear that the designers of both of those transports
produced the best ff/rw feature possible within the technical constraints
of the transport technology.

> it's helpful to understand some details of how FF/RW
> scanning works on a CD player, since that is the behavior we want to
> emulate.

It seems that you are making the problem harder than it needs to be. ff/rw
on a slim device doesnt have to work *the same way* as a CD player. It
doesnt have to "blurp". Nor does it need to sound like chipmunks. 

It was never the case that some user focus group decided it would be
desirable a CD player to play "blurps" while fast forwarding - some
engineer did it that way because it was EASY. Yes, this relates your final
point on code complexity. I agree this should be the driving factor here.

So, is there a *different* method of handling the ff/rw use case which is
technically easier? I can make some guesses.....


> Every format has different size frames, and many
> can even be variable in size. For some formats it is not possible to
> know how far to look ahead in order to advance by some amount of time.
> You either have to guesstimate and then resync

Would it really be a showstopper to guesstimate, without the resync? It was
never a problem that the advance speed of FF on a tape varied with how much
tape was already spooled.

> or you have to process every frame in between.

For the rewind case, every frame would already have been processed anyway.

> Currently our transcoding
> capability does not support seeking of any kind within a track

Maybe slimserver could spool the output of the transcoding process to disk,
and seek within that? Would it be OK for seeking to have a granularity of a
few seconds (or a few frames)?

> In order to quickly move to a different point in
> the stream, you would need to implement a very sophisticated buffering
> scheme,

So we need a user interface for choosing the ff/rw restart point which
sidesteps this buffering problem. SongScanner suggests one solution.



_______________________________________________
audiophiles mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles

Reply via email to