Announce: HydraPlayer plugin: a SliMP3 emulator written in perl

[torp]

I've recently created a web page for the plugin I wrote called HydraPlayer. The site can be found here:

http://www.noid.net/hydraplayer/hydraplayer.html

Here's a brief description of what it does:

HydraPlayer is a SliMP3 emulator written in perl. The emulator can function on its own (stand alone mode), but it's mostly useful when run as a plugin within the SlimServer. When running in plugin mode, it can spawn multiple emulator sessions, one per detected Squeezebox controller. The players are synchronized with the controllers such that the Squeezebox controller is used for media selection, volume control, etc. and the player sessions are used to actually drive the speakers.

- Tor Perkins

[andyg]

Cool, can I ask why you are emulating SliMP3 instead of SB2? SliMP3 requires a lot more overhead on the server and is more fragile because it's using UDP. Also it only supports MP3 although I see you have hacked something in there to support FLAC.

[torp]

When I first started the project, I looked at the source code for the slimp3slave player, and it looked pretty tiny and straight forward. At the time, SlimProtoLib was not ready yet, but I looked at the source and it seemed to be both larger and more complex. So I decided it would be easier for me to implement SliMP3 rather than SB2 in perl...

As you noticed, with a tiny hack, the SlimServer will send FLAC to a SliMP3 player, and since I did not have any real SliMP3 hardware that would complain about that, I decided to go for it...

I have not looked into it recently, and it was not available back then, but if there exists a perl module that wraps around SlimProtoLib (or something), that would be a good way to go...

[BodgeIT]

Are you thinking about updating this plugin so that it can run with the latest servers? I for one would like to see it.

[torp]

I have no immediate plans to do so as the system is working really well for me at the moment...