Notices

Hi,

while looking for a CLI music player for my N900 I stumbled upon cplay [1]. Specifically I was looking for a player that's merely an mplayer frontend since we already have mplayer working on the N900 and I didn't want to mess with multimedia dependencies.

Essentially the whole player is only a single python script and it works quite fine after having deactivated two lines of code which had to do with window resizing but would be pointless on the N900 anyways.
I created a deb package based on the Debian Squeeze package which has no changes compared to the Debian package except for being optified and those two lines I mentioned before (starting from #1609 of /opt/maemo/usr/bin/cplay in the package).

There is one problem though:
cplay was not designed to work with mplayer. Since it's simply a frontend for other players it works nevertheless but it seems to be unable to derive the lengths of tracks from mplayer. mplayer outputs the length and the currently elapsed time to STDOUT but I guess the string format is incompatible to what cplay expects. cplay uses that information for seeking and a progress bar, which therefore don't work if mplayer is used as a backend.
This problem is not N900/Maemo-specific but occurs on Debian too. Therefore fixing this might be a real improvement to cplay not only in our community but as a project.
Unfortunately I have virtually no knowledge in python at all. In fact I'm not even able to determine where in the source code cplay gets the length information.

Therefore I'm asking if someone with python experience could have a look at the code and maybe even fix it.
Thank you very much!

[1] http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/cplay