Running mm-player

Client applications don't have to start mm-player in the same way that they must run other multimedia services at specific times to perform tasks. CAR systems use the System Launch Monitor (SLM) service to start mm-player during bootup. Applications should manually start mm-player only for recovery purposes.

Starting mm-player with command options during bootup

SLM automates process management by starting processes in an order that respects their interprocess dependencies. The list of processes to launch and their properties, including their command-line arguments and interprocess dependencies, is written in a configuration file (/etc/slm-config-all.xml). For the full explanation of how SLM works, see the "System Launch and Monitor (SLM) section" of the System Services Reference.

Using SLM to start mm-player ensures that the in-car system can browse and play media as soon as the system finishes booting up and also that mm-player runs with the same command options and therefore behaves consistently from one bootup to the next.

SLM is preconfigured to start mm-player with specific command options but you can change these options to better suit the needs of your in-car system.
To change the command options passed by SLM to mm-player:
  1. From a command console connected to your in-car system, navigate to and open the SLM configuration file, whose full path is /etc/slm-config-all.xml.
  2. In the configuration file, locate the component that specifies the properties for mm-player.
    This component is the <SLM:component> XML object with the name "mmplayer".
  3. Change the value of the <SLM:args> tag in the "mmplayer" component to hold the new set of mm-player command-line options.
    For the full list of available command-line options, see "Command line for mm-player".
  4. Save the changes to the SLM configuration file and return to the console.
  5. If you want the new configuration to take effect immediately, in the console, enter reboot.

    The system reboots and the SLM utility relaunches all processes, including mm-player, with their command options given in the configuration file. When the system finishes reloading, mm-player is running with the new configuration.

    If you don't reboot immediately after changing the configuration file, mm-player continues to run with its previous configuration, until you shut down the system and restart.