Overview

Clapper Enhancers are special plugins loaded through libpeas for Clapper library. The idea is to enhance it (including applications that use Clapper) with new capabilities that do stuff outside of GStreamer scope of things without increasing number of dependencies of Clapper itself (especially for features that not everyone needs).

To avoid confusion with term “plugins” that GStreamer uses, the name “enhancers” was choosen instead.

In addition to writing enhancers in pure C, they can be written in any programmable language that is supported by libpeas and works with Clapper library bindings (examples being Python, GJS and Vala). This makes it possible for individual users to add their own custom functionalities that they want to use individually.

Types

Clapper gives three interfaces for writing enhancers for different things, these are:

• Extractable
• Playlistable
• Reactable

Basics

Each enhancer is a libpeas compatible module. As such it follows its requirements for writing plugins and is a GObject sublass implementing one or more of interfaces that Clapper library provides.

Due to plugins nature, written enhancer can be either submitted to the main Clapper Enhancers repository when it seems useful for more than a single application or it can be shipped as part your application. Users can also write their own/custom local enhancer plugins.

Loading Enhancers

Clapper will try to lazy load enhancer modules, meaning they will not be loaded unless they are used. As an additional safety precaution, enhancers can be disallowed from their instances being created with ClapperEnhancerProxy:target-creation-allowed. Enhancers that operate on-demand (when supported URI is given) such as ClapperExtractable and ClapperPlaylistable are allowed (enabled) by default, while ClapperReactable are not.

Environment variables:

• CLAPPER_ENHANCERS_PATH - override for default path where Clapper loads enhancers from
• CLAPPER_ENHANCERS_EXTRA_PATH - additional path to scan for enhancer plugins

While both allow to specify multiple directories (with : separation), applications and users should mostly use extra path in order to add their own enhancers from non-standard installation directory. They can override default path in case where they want to forbid using stock enhancers for some reason.

Enhancer Proxies

In order to create enhancers when needed and use them only within thread they were created in, Clapper manages enhancer instances on its own. It gives applications proxy objects for browsing and configuring them.

Only after Clapper library is initialized, you can get either the global (application scope) list (ClapperEnhancerProxyList) of enhancers proxies with clapper_get_global_enhancer_proxies() or player scope with clapper_player_get_enhancer_proxies().

Properties set on the global list will carry over to all created player instances afterwards. While these set on a list from a player are applied to enhancers created by this player only. You can use that to your advantage to only allow creation of some type of enhancer in only some player instances.

Properties

Some enhancers might want to expose some configuration. For this cases they should install GObject properties in their class. They must only use fundamental types from the list below:

• boolean
• int
• uint
• double
• string

They should include one or more of ClapperEnhancerParamFlags. Properties in object can have global, local, neither or both flags at once.

The ones with CLAPPER_ENHANCER_PARAM_GLOBAL are for user to configure. They should be exposed (ideally in the UI) and used for things that make sense to be set for all applications at once (e.g. supported media codec by user device, preferred language, etc.).

On the other hand, properties with CLAPPER_ENHANCER_PARAM_LOCAL are for application scope usage only. They never carry over to other apps, nor they can be set on global enhancers list. Instead they are configured per player instance.

When property is neither global or local it is considered to be plugin internal property. Clapper will never access them, as such they can be of any type (not limited to above list). This also makes properties that are already installed in base classes of subclassed object not appear in the UI.

When both flags are set, property will initially use globally set value while still allowing application to override it content locally per player instance.

Extra flags like CLAPPER_ENHANCER_PARAM_FILEPATH and CLAPPER_ENHANCER_PARAM_DIRPATH can be used (usually with string type of property) in order to let application know that this field holds a file/directory path and allow it to present file selection dialog to the user instead of text entry.

Configuring Enhancers

Applications can browse properties of enhancer via clapper_enhancer_proxy_get_target_properties() which returns a list of GParamSpec. By inspecting their flags they can know whether property is global, local or both. Properties without any of these 2 flags set (internal ones) will not appear on this list.

Use clapper_enhancer_proxy_get_settings() to get a GSettings with global properties to read and write (note that only users should be able to change them, thus you might want to bind these into some UI widgets for that). These can be (with user consent) set on either proxy from global proxies list or the player one.

Use clapper_enhancer_proxy_set_locally() to set local properties. These are meant for applications to freely customize as they please. Remember that you can only set them on a enhancer proxy object belonging to some player instance and not the global list.

Plugin Info File

An enhancer plugin should be placed within directory that includes its [Peas] plugin description file. It should be a text file with a .plugin extension and contain at least following content:

[Plugin]
Module=example_enhancer
Name=Example Enhancer
Description=This enhancer serves as an example
Version=0.0.1

• Module - module entry file name. It also acts as enhancer ID and should be unique for each. It is recommended to use app/custom prefix in its name.
• Name - module friendly name for displaying in UI and such.
• Description - description to present to the user for what it does.
• Version - enhancer version. In order to lazy load enhancers, Clapper will cache each enhancer data and olny reload it if version changes, so keep this always updated.

If module is written in interpretable programming language it must also contain Loader key with interpreter name (e.g. Loader=python).

Some enhancer interfaces require additional fields to be put in this file. They are described in the requirements of each one in their documentation pages that are listed in the Types section.

Adding Enhancers to Flatpak App

If you are using Clapper as part of a Flatpak application, you can get all the enhancers from their main repo as an extension (info here), thus you do not need to build them yourself.

Configuration Sharing in Flatpak

In native system packages/installations where property with CLAPPER_ENHANCER_PARAM_GLOBAL flag is set for an enhancer, all apps get the same config values. In sandbox however, default permissions prevent access to config of these properties, thus setting them will only affect ClapperPlayer instances in this particular application. Keep this in mind when writing your own enhancer plugin.

You can allow configuration sharing in Flatpak by adding below permission to each application that uses Clapper Enhancers plugins (including Clapper itself):

--filesystem=xdg-config/clapper-0.0/enhancers:create

This can be done manually through either sudo flatpak override or tools such as Flatseal.

When this permission is set, users can configure enhancers from within Clapper application preferences in cases when a 3rd party app does not have any UI to configure them.

Please note that when doing so, any properties storing file/directory paths as values also need a permission override from user to access this specific file/directory. A good practice is to create a single directory for such files and allow all Flatpak with enhancers to access this directory (including subdirectories) or just store them somewhere in allowed above user config directory (usually: ~/.config/clapper-0.0/enhancers).