Although it conveniently abstracts the many steps required to play media through
mm-renderer, mmrplay is limited in terms of the
media operations that it supports.
The mmrplay utility can only play a media track or playlist and
report any errors and (optionally) the playback completion.
It can't accept any commands during playback to select another input or to change
the playback position or speed. To support these other operations, you must
either use mm-renderer directly or call its API
through mmcli.
When to use mmrplay
You should use
mmrplay if you want to:
- rapidly and easily prototype a media app by enabling only basic playback, which
lets you focus more on designing other app features
- play media files by issuing a single command instead of the lengthy API call
sequence needed to connect to mm-renderer, configure an
output and an input, start playback, and process events
When to use mm-renderer
You shouldn't use
mmrplay, but instead use
mm-renderer if you want to:
- offer the ability to pause or stop playback, to adjust the play speed, or to
change playlists without interrupting playback
- reuse the same context for multiple playback operations so that you don't have
to redefine the context parameters
- support configuration of individual playlist tracks
- customize how playback events and errors are handled and reported