steveg at moregruel.net (Steve Greenland):
> ...but MPD is not a good solution for an N800 standalone player *at this
> time*. There are two big issues.
I just have to say I've been using mpd exclusively as my media
player for over a month and have been very happy with it (much
more than my attempts with other media players). I mainly like it
because it's unintrusive and I want a scriptable interface.
> 1. CPU usage. MPD doesn't use the tremor vorbis library, and thus
> playing an ogg sucks down about 75% of the CPU. In comparison, with
> Kagu, the osso-media-server process uses about 25% of the CPU. (Kagu
> sucks another 10-15% if the screen is active.)
For me, playing mp3s, mpd always hovers around 10% cpu. I don't
have oggs to play to compare. I can easily play songs while doing
other things. And there's no noticeable difference with battery
life compared to when I was using canola.
I don't know enough about all the different ogg libraries but a
quick search seems to indicate that mpd supports the tremor
library. So it should be pretty trivial to get that working.
> 2. As a straight port of the Debian MPD package, the mpd server restarts
> automatically on reboot *and resumes playing the oggs*. This is not
> good, because it slows down the rest of the reboot process quite a bit,
> and, since there isn't any free CPU, it sounds *dreadful*.
I personally changed the priority of mpd's start. I moved it to
S99mpd in /etc/rc2.d so it doesn't start until after everything is
loaded. And if it was playing before you rebooted, don't you want
it to continue?
