Nice work!

You might want to take a look at the -input parameter.  You can point that at a fifo and send mplayer commands into that fifo to get them to control the player.

mplayer lets you call it with "-input file=name_of_pipe", causing it to read commands from that file.  If it's a named pipe, that can be a convenient way of sending commands to mplayer.

But it occurs to me that you may be able to do some fancy things by making calls to ChumbyNative methods.  For starters, call _pipeOpen() from Flash and call mplayer, and then call _pipeWrite() to send it commands.  E.g. to play /mnt/storage/movie.avi, you'd call:

mplayer = _pipeOpen("/mnt/storage/mplayer /mnt/storage/movie.avi")

And then to pause the movie, you'd send a single Space character by calling:

_pipeWrite(mplayer, " ");

Or to quit, call:

_pipeWrite(mplayer, "q");

If you wanted to be really fancy, you'd call _setDisplay(1) first, and then fiddle around with chromakey and alpha to overlay your controls on top of the movie player behind your Flash widget.

Of course, this all assumes your widget is running as the master instance, which is what you get when you run stop_control_panel; chumbyflashplayer.x -i /path/to/your/widget.swf

I did what you recommended, started mplayer via a pipe. It is started properly but then I only have a frame displayed and no sound. Do you have any clues why?
Also, is there a way to start my local flash application from the control panel?

Actually now I understand better.

I added that in the flash application:
_root.onEnterFrame = function(){
        ChumbyNative._setDisplay(1);
}

So I can see the video. I do not know if it is the good way to do it but it works.

Regarding audio, the devices seems to be locked by the flash player. I compiled mplayer with oss audio output, so i'll try with ALSA to check if it behaves better. If not, I am not sure it is possible to have audio at all...
Woud you have a hint on that?

Then, how would you also do to start and external flash from the control panel? Is there some customizable control to which we can attach a script?

Thanks!

Thanks.

By external flash, I meant how to execute a custom flash application (or a script) from the control panel. Typically, what i'd like to do is play my videos which are on the file system from the usual chumby user interface. I understand I need to stop the control panel, execute my flash application and when over, restart the control panel. So is there a button or something that I can customize in the control panel to start my application?

Could you hook into the external music system to add local Flash widgets that get run with full privileges?  From looking at the docs, you could have a do-nothing Music Player.swf and then have a control panel that actually handled the mplayer control.

with mplayer using alsa I have both audio and video working in a flash application started via a pipe as described above. So now, I just have to find a nice way to start it from the user interface to avoid using ssh.

Thanks.

Of course I'll. I started a gforge project. I'll post the link when available.

No pb. Here is a link to the binary (it needs ncurses which i included in the zip).
http://dl.free.fr/fXtF9YwMg

I'm a happy chap - get_iplayer and mplayer running straight on the Chumby itself!

It's only working for radio streams at the moment (flvstreamer missing) - but I'm sure that can be rectified :-)

What a lovely gadget the Chumby is...

It works okay here with Unzip 5.52 and whatever the built in ZIP handler is in Windows.

e34dc552e7697491d868bc075139dcc8  mplayer.zip

Would that be possible for Chumby classic?