xgi
Alternatives for mpv and vlc dependencies
I recently stumbled upon castero and I love it. I was planning on packaging it for SailfishOS because I think it would go very well with cmus on this mobile OS.
However, I realized castero requires mpv or vlc for playback. Those dependencies are not easy to resolve for SailfishOS (I am not sure why since I didn't really try myself, but I assume it may be because they display windows, and therefore need some work to make them comply with the old Wayland version SFOS uses).
Are there any potential widespread fallback utilities that could be used to play media files, like ffmpeg? I think cmus for instance allows decoding files with ffmpeg, and requires no other media players.
This is reasonable, I think it would be good to have a lower-requirement playback option. However when I looked into the past (when starting castero in fact) I couldn't find any good existing Python libraries. If I could I probably wouldn't have made mpv/vlc an option in the first place.
cmus does a lot more low-level audio handling than castero does, which is something I've shied away from in the past. I think this is actually very worth doing a deep-dive into now since handling player libraries has been causing some other issues. If there were a good existing playback library that only needed ffmpeg/gstreamer I would love to use it, but I haven't found one yet. I'll need to do more research on this.
However your suggestion has actually gotten me very motivated to work on this, haha. I'll plan on making this possible, but it'll probably be a significant effort.
Awesome, I'm glad already that the idea got your attention. I would be happy to help but I can't do much more than testing, however, since I'm not into programming at all, let alone Python.