MTP Progress…

…or lack thereof. I’ve hit a few walls with things, and been struggling to find the energy to debug them.

libgphoto2 has proven to probably be the best choice for interfacing with MTP devices, but it’s holding a few issues right now that have slowed me down immensely…

  1. Metadata. Marcus is working on this, but I don’t have the ability to read it yet, and write support is more just a figment of my imagination right now. Seeing that libgphoto2 is so advanced, the code for it is way over my head and I’ve been just kindly pestering Marcus as he works on things, and he actually went out and bought himself a Zen as well for debugging and testing. Marcus has been my hero lately and has made some great progress!
  2. HAL issues with banshee and libgphoto2. I’m having trouble even figuring out where to debug this one. It seems that when I call libgphoto2’s camera detection routine, HAL must go on the flip…because when I get to the device initialization, the HAL pointer is stale and returns -1 for everything. All my attempts to hack past this (running detect after HAL validation, not running the detection routine, etc) have failed…I think it’s time to figure out what’s happening. Maybe banshee just needs to refresh it’s HAL information between creating the device class and calling it’s initialize? I don’t know, and I’m not familiar with the code enough to really know what I’m talking about.

So…I guess it’s been just a bit of a bummer lately b/c I feel like I’m stuck. libmtp worked in it’s own special way, but has proven to be under heavy development and hasn’t reached any of the maturity that libgphoto2 has, but libmtp did work. Makes me wonder if I should give it another shot…but…the gphoto developers have been so helpful and I know they’ll get it all working in the end. Argh!

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