Re: New input plugin for catching streams

Hi,

On Sat, 2003-08-02 at 14:32, Frantisek Dvorak wrote:
>  Hi xine team,
> 
> I would like contribute new input plugin which grabs streams as go
> from input plugins - rip input plugin. It was tested with several
> input plugins and demuxers, all combinations (except reading files via
> CDDA...):


imho this is a very interesting feature, and your solution of an input
plugin chain looks very nice.


> 'input.ripping' config option resets back to 0 after using RIP input
> plugin. I agree that using config option is dirty hack, I don't know
> how to work better with stream-related options.


yes, it sounds like a dirty hack to me too :)
have you considered something like:

- move the "rip" plugin to xine-engine. it is an special (dummy) plugin
anyway, we will have more flexibility handling it there.
- add an mrl option like #rip:filename or similar. we could call
find_input_plugins() as usual and then pass it to this special plugin.


> Legal issue:
> There was something about legal issue on this list about catching
> streams. I think it depends on user what he want to do with data in
> his computer: Save it? Or decode and send into speakers? And user
> should know what he may and what not. But I'm not jurist...


i guess this is a controversial area. i would like to conciliate two
things:

1) imho xine should remain on the good side of the law. it was never
meant to be a piracy tool, so we should try to respect copyright owners.

2) several users will think this is a very useful feature. for example,
users of slow/unreliable links may want to cache a streaming file to
disk to watch it better.

what i would suggest is adding a capability to the input plugin to
report something like "disk caching forbidden". if the server say the
stream must not be saved to disk, we should respect it and rip plugin
would fail to initialize.

for example, thanks to Bastien talking to Nullsoft people, xine is an
"white listed" user-agent of their streaming server. however they have
asked to not allow saving the streams to disk. i believe we should
respect their desire when they have being kind to support "xine/..." as
a valid user-agent.

of course, xine is free source and people is also free to change their
copies to remove such test. that would be a very similar situation as
explained by xpdf author:

http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/cracking.html

thoughts?

Miguel



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