[MPlayer-cygwin] Writing frontend: Other options than stdin for slave mode?

[Frank Stoeckl]

Hi all,
due to the fact that mplayer currently doesn't support the GUI mode with 
the cygwin environment I decided to write a frontend which supports skins, 
a playlist and many more for windows.

At the current develop state I begin to experience some problems, but I'm 
sure they aren't
too heavy to solve them.

The first problem is:
according to the manual, mplayer is able to act in a slave mode:

-- schnipp --
3.2.3 Slave mode
The slave mode allow you to build simple frontend to MPlayer. When enabled 
(with the -slave switch) MPlayer will read commands separated by new line 
(\n) from stdin.
-- schnapp --

As we all know, windows doesn't have a device like stdin.
But that doesn't mean that we aren't able to use the slave mode, i have 
several ideas how to solve the problem, here are two:
1.) Window messages between the frontend and the DirectX overlay window (in 
my opionion a bad option)
2.) (and the - in my opinion better idea - ) is to give the ability to run 
mplayer for example with the parameters '-slave win32'.
Mplayer will open a socket for local loopback connections and the frontend 
will connect to the socket. Now every data sent to the socket could be 
handled as if it comes from stdin. I'm sure this wouldn't require a heavy 
patch.
...If somebody could write a patch for option 2.) , it would give me the 
ability to interact directly with mplayer without any API (window messages).

In general: what do you think about my idea?

Have a nice weekend:
Frank


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