bmp-mp4: A Plugin for MP4/AAC playback with BMP

bmp-mp4: A Plugin for MP4/AAC playback with beep-media-player.

The bmp-mp4 plugin hosted here was based heavily off code written by `ciberfred', which was released here. The libfaad API has changed since that code was released, so minor alterations were required to bring the code up to date; further changes have been largely aesthetic. On buying an iPod, I wanted to rip my tracks to AAC format rather than use MP3; this was easy enough to achieve, but I soon discovered that there was no working plugin for beep-media-player (or at least, no plugin which would work on my system). As such, I took the existing code, and plugged away at it until I got it to work.

Downloads

The plugin: bmp-mp4-20050912.tar.bz2

The source code: bmp-mp4-20050912-src.tar.bz2

A list of changes so far includes:

Code, and makefiles, altered to adhere to new libfaad API.
Fixed code so that the final 3 seconds of a file will play, as opposed to cutting off the final few frames of the track.
Fixed handling of URL-style filenames passed to bmp via the Gnome file selector (URLs are de-url'd and "file://" removed from the string if the filename is a URL).
Added code to allow for the reading of track information both during playback and on the file appearing in the playlist.
Further cosmetic changes to code.

Items still to be covered includes:

Adding a file info box for tracks, probably utilising existing libmpg123 plugin code.
Fixing playback for varying types of audio files; this process requires people to generate and test against filetypes different to those that I play -- 128kbps AAC generated by the faac utility.
Looking into making the plugin work with the audioscrobbler plugin, such that tracks played are reported on www.last.fm profiles.

Resources

audiocoding.com, home of libfaac and libfaad2.
libfaad2 API, for decoding audio files (30kB PDF).
sourceforge.net project page.

Contact

If you have a burning desire to get in touch to submit a patch or tell me how foolish I am (for whatever reason), I can be mailed at sdstrowes at gmail.com.

Page last updated 15th September, 2005.