[review]

Forkosigan:

Quote:

No, and it probably won't be possible in the future ... To hear a web radio, you usually need Flash Player, which in the browser to a reader is not possible.

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Did I mention that I like those challenges? Well, of course as Forkosigan mentioned, flash on the ebook is not to be expected anytime soon. And I think we also don't need it. But was there no web radio before we got youtube and co? Of course and many flash web players still use the same protocol, they just wrap around the flash container. If you know the url you can very well play any webradio station you like... and there are databases of thousands and thousands of webstations. Not to mention shoutcast.

So I thought, let's port a network enables media player. Preferrentially one which has support for the various windows codecs.

Well, I ported mplayer and it works. Well, sort of. What can you expect in less than 8 hours?

What you get is alpha stage: proof-of-concept. To make a nice user frontend around it is not that much of a challenge. Sure it'll take a bit of time but there is no dead-end to be expected as the crucial part works already.

It was a bit of challenge as initially I got some Permission denied errors. (arrg. /dev/dsp (the linux sound card) had the wrong permissions) but in the end I found a way around it.

But speaking of a frontend: Do we really need a frontend for a radio? It should run in the background anyway, shouldn't it? And there is not much what you could do with a radio anyway apart from volume control. Unfortunately the volume control with the buttons doesn't work so accordingly it is fairly loud... but I guess we should be able to sort this somehow as well.

Installation
1) create in system a folder called mplayer and in mplayer a folder called bin
2) extract and copy mplayer to system\mplayer\bin
3) copy classic.app somewhere
4) copy all-music-off.app somewhere

If you want to turn it off just run the all-music-off app.

There is something to say about codecs but I will do this in another post. Also if you have a look in the classic.app you will see how simple it will be to create an almost infinite library of webradios within no time.


EDIT:
progress update: managed to get volume under control as well. What this means that it is really only the work left to make a nice and shiny user interface. Wifi, streams, decoding, audio output, volume control ... it all works already. (the attached version is the initial release without volume control)

EDIT:
uploaded vers. 1b which has a typing mistake correct. Thanks to all who reported it.