Project Home
Project Home		 Documents
Documents		 Wiki
Wiki		 Discussion Forums
Discussions		 Project Information
Project Info
Multimedia/Discussion/General/External playlist file formats/List of Posts
Forum Topic - External playlist file formats: (5 Items)
   
Update
Thomas Fletcher
04/06/2009 2:47 PM
post26123
External playlist file formats   
Doing a quick search of the documentation, I can't seem to find a description of the (externally generated) playlist 
file formats that are supported by Aviage 1.1.

Creating an iPod playlist and then just transferring that file (exported as XML, renamed the extension to pls so it 
would be picked up by the synchronizer) puts the entry into the playlist table, but doesn't seem to match up with the 
entries in the database.

In any case, pointers to "stuff to read" more than welcome.

Thanks,
 Thomas
---
Crank Software
www.cranksoftware.com
Tim Jenkins(deleted)
04/06/2009 3:00 PM
post26125
Re: External playlist file formats   
> Doing a quick search of the documentation, I can't seem to find a description 
> of the (externally generated) playlist file formats that are supported by 
> Aviage 1.1.

It might be missing. :-)

For Aviage 1.1, .pls, .m3u and .wpl are supported.

Note that they have be formatted as per the definitions of those types, so renaming an Itunes .xml file to .pls won't 
work because they aren't the same.

We are somewhat tolerant of character encoding in m3u and pls files. They're supposed to be ISO8859.1, but we'll handle 
UTF-8.

More character encoding support is coming in later releases.

> 
> Creating an iPod playlist and then just transferring that file (exported as 
> XML, renamed the extension to pls so it would be picked up by the synchronizer
> ) puts the entry into the playlist table, but doesn't seem to match up with 
> the entries in the database.

No, because the .pls parser doesn't recognize the iTunes format.

> 
> In any case, pointers to "stuff to read" more than welcome.

Sorry; I couldn't find any. Perhaps other will know.

Tim
Thomas Fletcher
04/08/2009 7:53 AM
post26329
Re: External playlist file formats   
Tim Jenkins wrote:
> > Doing a quick search of the documentation, I can't seem to find a
> > description of the (externally generated) playlist file formats
> > that are supported by Aviage 1.1.
>
>  It might be missing. :-)
>
>  For Aviage 1.1, .pls, .m3u and .wpl are supported.

Thanks to you and Peter for your replies.  I have a couple of 
suggestions for
the documentation in this area:

1: File extensions are not formats.  For the actual media files, often 
these are
created by other programs but since playlists can quite easily be created by
users, it would be nice if there was a reference to the actual format and or
format _name_. 
 
 An outsourced table with links would also be fine.  Something along the 
lines of:

Format, Typcial File Extension, Typical Creator Program, Additional 
Information
i.e.
Windows Media Player Playlist, pls, Windows Media Player, <wikipedia?>

2: If there is anything special about the content of the playlist that 
is required, that
would be good to highlight.  For example if the playlist is created on 
Windows and
it uses Windows paths to the files, what are the limitations on matching 
to those
files on my media store?  Will the playlist ever match content on a 
mediastore
that is different from the mediastore containing the playlist? 

  Rather than figure it out by trial and error, and get bitten by some 
future change
in behaviour, it would be nice to explicitely spell out the playlist 
resolution process.

3: If the file extension and not the actual file content are the only 
things that the
playlist parsers key off of, then please make this explicit.  One would 
think, based
on the rest of the media framework, that you could just add new 
extensions into
the playlist configuration area and if _one_ of the playlist parsers can 
figure it out
that it will.  Reading between the lines on the replies from Tim and 
Peter it seems
that this _may_ not be the case.

 I haven't tried it, so if it does indeed run through all of them, then 
that would be
good to state as well.

I've switch to testing with m3u (MP3 URL =;-), generated on my target 
machine
for now to exercise the playlist functionality.  Clients however won't 
be building
playlist files in Neutrino =;-)

Thanks again,
 Thomas
Nicola Vulpe
04/08/2009 10:39 AM
post26397
Re: External playlist file formats   
Thanks for the suggestions. The 1.2 docs will have more information. I agree that the less trial and error the better.l
Peter Martin(deleted)
04/06/2009 3:01 PM
post26126
Re: External playlist file formats   
On Mon, 6 Apr 2009, Thomas Fletcher wrote:

>Doing a quick search of the documentation, I can't seem to find a
>description of the (externally generated) playlist file formats that are
>supported by Aviage 1.1.
>
>Creating an iPod playlist and then just transferring that file (exported
>as XML, renamed the extension to pls so it would be picked up by the
>synchronizer) puts the entry into the playlist table, but doesn't seem to
>match up with the entries in the database.

Aviage 1.1 offered support for the following 3 playlist formats:
(taken from mme.conf)

<!-- Playlist extensions don't need any attributes -->
<playlists>
    <extension value="m3u"/>
    <extension value="pls"/>
    <extension value="wpl"/>
</playlists>

Each has a specific parser to handle the extraction of the data so
re-labeling an itunes generated xml based playlist to wpl will not work as
the internal formats are different.

itunes generated playlist handling is being considered for a future
release.

Thanks,

Peter

>
>In any case, pointers to "stuff to read" more than welcome.
>
>Thanks,
> Thomas
>---
>Crank Software
>www.cranksoftware.com
>
>_______________________________________________
>General
>http://community.qnx.com/sf/go/post26123
>
>

Return


  A subsidiary of BlackBerry             All content ©2004-2013, QNX Software Systems