Finally, some news from softwareland. A couple of weeks ago, I made an interesting discovery: MPD. Some people might already know it as it is widely used as a remote jukebox on some old hardware with a bunch of speakers attached to it. I was discussing this piece of software with a friend when suddenly it struck me: this is perfect for nMedia!
It has some great features and meets all of our requirements, plus adds tons of possibilities. We could for example install a web server and a webinterface for it so that you could go like: "Hey, my car is like.. 10 meters away, and I don't want to walk all that. I'm just going to boot up my laptop, connect to my nMedia box over WiFi, and fire up my webbrowser!".
How cool would that be? I'lll tell you how cool: "DE MAX, KENNY!" (loosely translated: "Awesome, Bobby!").
On their wiki we discovered a bunch of clients, including some written in GTK+. These could provide us with a starting point, as we aren't the greatest C++ coders around. Basically, the "only" code we would have to write is the front-end, and make some calls over a socket to MPD to tell it what to play. The only point that is still unclear is how to add some visualization to our client. That is one of the features we really want, because having this nice touchscreen only displaying boring buttons is, well, boring.
I hope this will speed up the development, and maybe encourage us by taking a huge load of work off our backs. Thank you MPD!
