[Canola] Canola2 Updates - Beta7, Themes, and YouTube Plug-in

[handful]

Hi everyone!

The youtube plugin is already done, but please do the following :

(THIS IS MANDATORY FOR THIS RELEASE) DO IT IN THE FOLLOWING SEQUENCE :

1) Update or install Canola beta7 ( has the fix to allow youtube)
2) Update all the themes you use ( we uploaded new versions )

ONLY THEN YOU INSTALL YOUTUBE :

3) Install Canola-youtube plugin

IF YOU DON'T DO IT LIKE THAT ... WELL YOU KNOW :)

Then you are ready to go.

Release notes:

Source code for the youtube plugin is available on the website on the developer's corner.

:)

[rcadden]

rock on! works great, keep up the great work

[cLin]

YAY! Let's hope this doesn't break anything.

What else is updated from beta6->7

edit: I get a no space left on drive when I try to open the video "CineMassacre 200" I found it on the top rated.

[handful]

cLin : we have this small issue that is downloading to home folder, please I know it's boring but can you free some space just while we implement the folde chooser?

MArcelo

[Laughing Man]

How much free space is needed? I have about 13 MBs left on my device and it's giving me that message.

[yabbas]

can't tell you how much this rocks!

really can't wait till the streaming radio track titles are fixed. this really is fast becoming the internet tablet ui ;) (heck you could rebadge the n800 as another device if canola booted straight in)

one minor request - as video is prebuffering perhaps quickly fade the description in so people can read somerhing whilst it's doing the business.

also - video can't be rewound, fast forward, etc - possible to add?

...going off to check if themes support rotation :)

[yabbas]

video saved fine for me...though it's hidden away somewhere in canola's folders, heh

oooh...just noticed a photocast folder on my removable card, did canola do that?

[mobiledivide]

This works EXCELLENT for short vids, but trying to DL anything long (>10 minutes is all I have tried) gives up the out of memory issue. Anything we can adjust to get this to work in a setting?

[taguapire]

Hi,

Why videos are so laggy? The plug-in/Canola has a very poor performance playing Youtube videos.

Regards,

Taguapire.

[Comitizer]

I cant see beta7 only beta6, am I looking in the right place? I've seen all the previous updates.

[Comitizer]

Whoops...forgot to refresh my app list...pay no attention to me...

[Nif]

Installation went fine and plugin looks cool. Only question I have is about the aspect ratio. Youtube clips are in 4:3, but in Canola they are played 'widescreen'. Is there a way to configure this?

[osofast]

Wow, great work again guys.

[ghoonk]

Followed the instructions, and did a search for a youtube favourite of mine (achmed the dead terriorist by jeff dunham), but the video does not play.

[sachin007]

Wow wonderful add on. You guys rock. Keep it up.

[sachin007]

Hi,

Why videos are so laggy? The plug-in/Canola has a very poor performance playing Youtube videos.

Regards,

Taguapire.

Yeah the same here. I think it has to do with the aspect ratio, But please correct the lag otherwise it is a great feature.

Not to disappoint you but because of the lag the videos are unwatchable.

[handful]

Hei guys, we had some of this in the testing phase, it was the version of mplayer.
Can you please take a look what version are you using? we tested with 24 and it was the performance we wanted.

Also, make sure you are not downloading podcasts (as this is a slowdown, listed on the website)

@goonk : this will happen, mplayer simple does not play ALL videos. some videos really fail. We are looking to see if mplayer evolves this, and if we can help them.


@nif : I know this is annoying, and we already fixed it, but it's not on the last mplayer (MorpheuZ did a mplayer patch just for that). So we recommend people to be just a little patient that this patch is coming and solves all strech problems :)


Sorry for the small incoveniences guys, we will work on them asap!


Marcelo

[El Amir]

For all thoses wondering where to get the addon, the website is : http://openbossa.indt.org.br/canola/add.html

Enjoy!:)

Great work team Canola!

[Bundyo]

It is also in the extras :)

[sachin007]

Hei guys, we had some of this in the testing phase, it was the version of mplayer.
Can you please take a look what version are you using? we tested with 24 and it was the performance we wanted.

Also, make sure you are not downloading podcasts (as this is a slowdown, listed on the website)

@goonk : this will happen, mplayer simple does not play ALL videos. some videos really fail. We are looking to see if mplayer evolves this, and if we can help them.


@nif : I know this is annoying, and we already fixed it, but it's not on the last mplayer (MorpheuZ did a mplayer patch just for that). So we recommend people to be just a little patient that this patch is coming and solves all strech problems :)


Sorry for the small incoveniences guys, we will work on them asap!


Marcelo

So do you guys want us to shift to version 24 or just hold on a little longer?

I have also noticed that sometimes the video plays fine but another time the same video plays choppy and i am talking about saved videos without anything else running in the background.

Not complaining just informing you guys.

[qwerty12]

Nice :)

I already had it (canola) installed so I did as root:
apt-get update ;; apt-get upgrade ;; apt-get install canola2-youtube-plugin

[handful]

at least 24 :/ we tested with both 24 and 26. Our fix is not on 26 bur probably on next one : /
yes, this is really the mplayer (version)

[onion_cfe]

The whole thing seems a lot more stable now, and the YouTube plug-in is working great for me. This is so much better than trying to use the site in microb.

My only question - are there any plans to get untitled albums and artists back into the album/album cover and artist views? I remember you (handful) seemed to agree it would be a good move, and it's now really the only thing keeping me for using the app full time. If it was just handled exactly as it was in Canola 1, it would be perfect.

"All Songs" is just too tricky when bombing down the motorway, particularly now the tiny scroll bar is disabled and it's necessary to inertia through tens of pages to reach the later half of the alphabet whilst not accidentally clicking anything, steering the car, talking on the phone and drinking coffee.

But, like I said - looking very good, and love all the themes too.

Cheers,
Tom

[Mika73]

Hi everyone!

The youtube plugin is already done, but please do the following :

(THIS IS MANDATORY FOR THIS RELEASE) DO IT IN THE FOLLOWING SEQUENCE :



Hi Handful

Question about installation. When you need boot? I remember older Canola version that I tryed earlyer and with it was important boot device and you couldnt have PSU connected when installed Canola.

I havent tryed Beta version course waited final version to come out and ofcourse little afraid of those beta versions anyway. But now Youtube plugin did come out.. And its really hard wait final version.. :)

Thanks
Mika

[stjuste]

great stuff guys. i did find that sometimes the return button didn't work but outside of that, great stuff. i look fwd to what's to come. nokia should pay you guys...

[qwerty12]

@stjuste

I think the paying thing was suggested before but I believe INdT was opened by Nokia or something like that.

But I agree, INdT team are great and produce a lot of stuff and handful is always helping people.

[tmilr87]

Handul,

You are da bomb. This app rocks! My daughter will be wanting to steal my tablet now. Thanks for all your hard work and keep the new stuff coming.

[muki]

Followed instructions, even rebooted, but no sign of plug-in. What should I expect to see?

[anidel]

if you've installed it from the webside or from the App Manager then it'll show up in the Video section, next to "My Videos".

[qwerty12]

The youtube plugin is seperate to canola. If you did install the plugin, go to video and it should be there. It is for me.

Anidel beat me :D

[muki]

Thanks for the pointers but I see only "My videos" with the usual images and audio icons to the left and right.

[muki]

Should have mentioned in previous post that I was using N800. Tried same sequence on N810 and the plug-in shows up (and works). Awaiting response from handful then I may try uninstall/re-install on the N800. Looking good!

[handful]

Hi guys,

I thank all of you in behalf of whole team for the compliments, also for the "first" run of our new " team member " Adriano, who did the youtube plugin main coding and also did the last.fm plugin (of course we are a team and theres the hand of everyone in the work). But I think it's a nice start for adriano joining our group :)

Let me try to answer some questions:


@Tom : thanks tom :) about the untitled albums its possible, the only problem is that you may get a huge list inside the album music list. But of course, we added browse by folder to aid that a little. We will get back to this, is always the same problem time x priorities.

Yeah, all songs will be a little pain while we don't deploy the search system or the jumpers in the bottom part. Our " care " is to just not take a 2 scroll approaches, as the device cannot hold the movement we need to the list to jump from one section to other.

for car mode we have other plans :) but we do listen to this, and lets see if we can improve it more as we go.

@Mika
You don't have to boot. If you don't have canola installed that's perfect. Install beta7, install the youtube plugin and themes if you like. no reboot necessary. The first reboots were just to make sure you "shutdown" all side " applications " that canola relies on and are being updated by a new installation.

Well, being quite honest, we fixed most of issues, and we could say it's final, as it's missing only upnp. the rest is always improvements, but I think the basics are covered very well already. It will get better for sure, but we don't think you will have any problem. But if you have it, it would be a pleasure to help you out until fix it. So if you want my word: you can install it already :)

@Stjuste
I think this small issues are something like the button is clicked when the cpu is too high (mplayer + downloading) and then the event is missed / drop.
About Nokia paying us, while we are not "Nokia" we do have Nokia on our company name, so you got the point :) and we consider ourselves part of the team trying to create great experiences for the Nokia devices :)

@tmilr87 :
Thanks, but the team is "da bomb" :) and youtube is one more work of all the guys together to make sure it goes smoothly. It's not only our first downloadable plugin but the first "third party plugin" and also fully opensource in GPL (download the source code on the website ). Get a tablet for your little girl as a gift :)))
new stuff : last.fm in the oven :) upnp : hard working on it, but it's not to the task (is a shame I know) and I think there's a lot to go and fix a lot of small but annoying issues. Also to help mplayer, xine to get better and better, because I know video is giving some headaches : /




Hi Muki: very strange, because we had "days" of testing, and etrunko only I think installed in something like 7 n800s just yesterday. Can you point us the previous state?
Be sure to not have some " devel " repositories, those are the guys who can really create a mess in the installation : /

Also: try running canola in xterm with -vv to see if the error happens when trying to load youtube, than show it to us...

We don't want to have problems with future plugins : /

marcelo

[Mika73]

I couldnt wait so I did install and test. Canola v2 Beta7 looks very nice. But I am having problem with YouTube search.. It does give An Unknown Error Has Occured. Most Recent/Most Viewed do work and it plays videos nice.

Search and categories wont work.. After I enter text to search, it starts search -> An unknown error has occured -> No items found.

Youtube isnt very nice when search doesnt work.. :(

[muki]

hi Marcelo, previous version installed was beta6, no themes. I cannot redirect terminal output (using '>') to capture canola debug output. Any suggestions?

I did have some devel repo's active but I'm fairly certain I disabled them before upgrading canola. Do you think a fresh canola install is needed or would you like to identify what is failing here first? I'm easy either way.

[handful]

Well, you can try doing the canola-cleanup, reboot and trying again :/ but this is fairly strange and of course we would like to find a bug and fix : / but we need as much information as possible

See if you just can read, and see if any error appears in the beginning of the debug messages in Xterm itself : /

[handful]

Mika : strange, because if it plays the video everything is working fine, no reason to break just the search.

Well, I know it sounds weird to ask you, but can you try 2 things:

1) open the webbrowser go to you tube and do a seach?
2) reboot and try again :?

this is quite strange : / we haven't see this error while perfectly connected : /

Marcelo

[Mika73]

Mika : strange, because if it plays the video everything is working fine, no reason to break just the search.

Well, I know it sounds weird to ask you, but can you try 2 things:

1) open the webbrowser go to you tube and do a seach?
2) reboot and try again :?

this is quite strange : / we haven't see this error while perfectly connected : /

Marcelo

It works now :)

I tryed with web browser next after I had problem. and ofcourse reboot is always good thing to try. I have no idea why that unknown error did come with search.. But now it works.. :)

Its very nice. Thank you a lot. :)

Now i only need find out how I add my favourite Podcasts http://retrobits.libsyn.com/ and http://c64takeaway.com/ to it ;)

Also I would be nice if search keyboard layout could be changed to qwerty or abc. I got back to play with it..:D

[muki]

Marcelo, I cannot see anything obvious in canola debug output so I have sent it to you in a PM.

BTW I have checked that /usr/share/canola/plugins/canola-tube.zip exists.

[handful]

Hi :
Mika : the tip : install canola-tuning. you get covers download + video thumbnails + the small application to add podcast without copy and pasting.
here's how it works : (http://www.openbossa.indt.org/canola/using.html#imedia)

Also the website has lots of tips and tricks to help you have even more performance (like avoid too big pictures, convert videos first, tagging your music etc)

Search keyboard? is the default maemo one : / it's QWERTY but you mean being in alphabetical order instead of qwerty?

Glad you like it!

marcelo

[muki]

Marcelo, first PM failed, see other requesting email address

[Reggie]

The INdT guys have been busy with Canola2. Today they announced Beta7 and the much anticipated YouTube plug-in.

The first major Canola2 plug-in, the YouTube plug-in allows you to search, bookmark and save videos from YouTube. Developers can now take a peek at the plug-in source code which can help pave the way for additional third-party Canola2 plug-ins. The plug-in still has suffers with the seek functionality which INdT hopes to help mplayer with in the future.

Three additional Canola2 themes have also been added for everyone to download -- Deep Blue, Flat Red, and Flat Black. They are available for download at the Canola2 Add-ons page.

If you are installing the YouTube plug-in, make sure to upgrade to Beta7 first via the Application Manager. New users can directly install the latest Canola2 version from the official Canola2 install page.

Provide feedback by directly replying on this article.Read the full article. (http://www.internettablettalk.com/2008/03/21/canola2-updates-beta7-themes-and-youtube-plug-in/)

[Mika73]

Hi :

Search keyboard? is the default maemo one : / it's QWERTY but you mean being in alphabetical order instead of qwerty?

Glad you like it!

marcelo

Its ok :)

I just have to play with this cool application a more.

[Tantris]

@handful, cLin
Is there anything contrary to a symlink from the canola youtube-temp-dir to, say, /media/mmc2/youtube-temp? I tested it on my device and it worked flawlessly

for those of you who want to try it (on risk and so on, and *remember* that you did this change, so you can revert it when canola has a folder chooser for this)

open an x-term shell: you are in your home direcory now.
cd .canola/youtube
create a new youtube-temp-directory, e.g. on /media/mmc2:
mkdir /media/mmc2/youtube-temp
now the "crucial part": this one deletes your normal canola temp-dir
rm -r videos
and now we create a symbolic link called "videos" which points to our newly created temp dir:
ln -s /media/mmc2/youtube-temp videos
(in caps this would be LN not 1N)

after this you should be able to do a
cd videos
echo 1 > 1

and if you open your filemanager and go to the folder in which the youtube temp-files should be stored (internal mem. card/youtube-temp)
you should see a very small file called "1" now.
Delete it, as we don't need it anymore and test your youtube videos...


To revert this change:
=================

open an x-term shell: you are in your home direcory now.
cd .canola/youtube
rm videos
mkdir videos

this will only delete the *link*, so your "new" youtube-temp directory is still there and can be deleted.

[zeez]

Hmm so since beta6 i can't play videos in canola anymore. (I hear audio, but get just a black screen). Mplayer however works. I have the problem with all videos. Now i upgraded to beta7, installed youtube plug in: same thing i get audio no video for youtube videos as well. I completly removed canola (used the canola-cleaner thingy) an reinstalled. Still same problem :( Any suggestions ?

[genome4hire]

Initial Feedback:

1. The plug-in is awesome.
2. I'm noticing some issues of video/audio being out of sync.
(for example, search for 'toxic', and select #2 'Yael Naim - Toxic'). Within 20 secs or so, it was totally out of sync (at least in full screen).

3. Any chance we can get support for High Def youtube videos? Most/all of these can be accessed, simply by adding "&fmt=18" to the end of the youtube url.

4. I see myself downloading a -lot- more video content now... but Canola still doesn't have an easy to use method of telling it to use the external MMC2. I have a nice 8GB card in the slot, which is getting very lonely. How about a GUI config option so I can tell canola where to download youtube/podcasts to?

Thanks

[sachin007]

Hmm so since beta6 i can't play videos in canola anymore. (I hear audio, but get just a black screen). Mplayer however works. I have the problem with all videos. Now i upgraded to beta7, installed youtube plug in: same thing i get audio no video for youtube videos as well. I completly removed canola (used the canola-cleaner thingy) an reinstalled. Still same problem :( Any suggestions ?

I had a problem with mplayer playing no audio at all. I deleted the .config files via xterm and did a clean install of mplayer. try that

[howardcb]

Thanks for the new themes, and the youtube plugin. I rarely watched youtube on my N800; that will change with the new release.

Now for my question/concern: The finger scrolling on my N800 doesn't work very well anymore. It worked fine on beta4, and then I had trouble on beta6 (I never downloaded beta 5). When I have a long list of files or album covers my N800 will respond to the first 1 or 2 "finger scrolls", and then it will only respond erratically. I'm running OS2008 on my N800, and I haven't added any new software recently.

Thanks,
Howard

[zeez]

@sachin007
Hmm didn't help. Thanks anyway. Weird thing so: i uninstalled mplayer to force canola to use the buid in mediaplayer: same thing sound but no video...

[Moonshine]

The plugin looks very promising... :D

I think my problem is with mPlayer, but FLV performance is pretty erratic on my n810. More often then not the video studders along at very regular intervals of about a second, and as others have seen looses lipsync.

I've tried going back to the 24 build of mplayer (rather then 26) and that is better, but still far from perfect. CPU use is only at like 25-35% on most of the videos, and they are low res, yet it's far from smooth for me 90% of the time. Randomly it seems to clear up at time(like after I've been in Canola a while if that would make any sense). Anyone else seeing this or should I make a fresh start ? :)

I guess I should mention I do have all desktop applets shut off and no other apps running.

[sachin007]

The plugin looks very promising... :D

I think my problem is with mPlayer, but FLV performance is pretty erratic on my n810. More often then not the video studders along at very regular intervals of about a second, and as others have seen looses lipsync.

I've tried going back to the 24 build of mplayer (rather then 26) and that is better, but still far from perfect. CPU use is only at like 25-35% on most of the videos, and they are low res, yet it's far from smooth for me 90% of the time. Randomly it seems to clear up at time(like after I've been in Canola a while if that would make any sense). Anyone else seeing this or should I make a fresh start ? :)

I guess I should mention I do have all desktop applets shut off and no other apps running.

Same thing here. I think they are going to update the version of mplayer for seamless playback

[zeez]

Hmm so now i purged canola & mplayer and reinstalled them and now the screen is green instead of black :(

[qwerty12]

Hmm so now i purged canola & mplayer and reinstalled them and now the screen is green instead of black :(

Are you using the rotation patch by anychance?

[zeez]

Are you using the rotation patch by anychance?

Yep, is that a problem ? (Being in normal view ?)

[qwerty12]

Yep, is that a problem ? (Being in normal view ?)

I had the same problem. Fanoush updated the kernel. Reflash the new one and the green screen will go.

As for me, I'm using a custom compiled kernel :P

[zeez]

Yeah that worked! Thanks! Lovin the plug in now ;)

[qwerty12]

Yeah that worked! Thanks! Lovin the plug in now ;)

Yeah, YouTube plugin is peng-a-leng :P :D

Lol, I just wish mplayer was better...

[spice3d]

Positives:
-Installed using upgrade process w/o problem. Previously I had to use the manual method.
-YouTube plugin seems to work fine

Negs:
-Often, the volume spikes at the very beginning of a song. It's like the volume is initially 100%, but then changes to actual setting. Even the slider on the left exhibits this visually.
-Podcast position doesn't remember it's position if you close the app or play a different file.
-Still hoping for ability to manually set cover art and thumbnail in Albums view :-)

[trustwiz]

Beautiful and amazing. I love it! I also received the OUT OF SPACE message after watching 3 YouTube videos. I removed my GizmoProject app (11mb) temporarily, but hope to put it back once this memory issue is resolved. I would love to put my OS2008 on one of my memory cards (two 8gb cards), but the articles I've read sound complicated and do not seem to be 100% perfect. If anyone knows of an easy way to put the OS2008 (N800) on a memory card, the memory problems would be resolved. I've seen the links to do this, but they seem difficult not having any Linux knowledge. Anyway, I can't wait for the next update. Keep up the good work.

[chrisak]

Are others here unable to paste url/addresses into the 'add link' fields under internet media? I'm using paste menu/dialog on n800 onscreen keyboard.

[slip]

So far everything works! (Update, installation of youtube plugin, searching for youtube videos, watching youtube videos)

Small UI things that would be nice:
1- On search results of youtube videos, it would be nice to see the length of the videos, in addition to that information already provided (star rating and # of views).
2- With the graphite theme, it is a little hard to see the download bar (the bar that moves across the screen as the video is being downloaded/buffered), because there isn't much contrast between the download bar and the grey background of the time bar. In other themes it may not be a problem.
3- "Local videos" could be called "Saved Videos" or "Videos Saved to Disk" instead. When I saw the term "local" videos, I thought there was a way to put in your zip code or address and find videos that we posted from around your geographic location! As a result, I expected saved videos to be listed when I clicked on the "My Videos" icon on the main screens.

All of these new Canola updates have made my N800 so much more useful!! I love downloading podcasts over wifi-- take that iPod!!

[loughmillermedia]

I just installed this at lunch and it rocks!!! I wish there was a way to specify were the saved videos are placed that wouldn't require using x-term. I really appreciate you guys for all your hard work on this great ap.

[mobiledivide]

Beautiful and amazing. I love it! I also received the OUT OF SPACE message after watching 3 YouTube videos. I removed my GizmoProject app (11mb) temporarily, but hope to put it back once this memory issue is resolved. I would love to put my OS2008 on one of my memory cards (two 8gb cards), but the articles I've read sound complicated and do not seem to be 100% perfect. If anyone knows of an easy way to put the OS2008 (N800) on a memory card, the memory problems would be resolved. I've seen the links to do this, but they seem difficult not having any Linux knowledge. Anyway, I can't wait for the next update. Keep up the good work.

Follow Tantris instructions found earlier in the thread word for word, line for line. They are EXACTLY what you need to do, in fact short of GUI I don't think it can get any simpler than those instructions. I was having a problem due to wanting to download long content, with this fix it makes Ctube perfect.
Once again good job Marcelo and team, this program and its functionality alone makes the IT worth the money.

[javier_h224]

i cant see the videos in youtube. i install the beta 7 and the plugin. the installation its ok. i see the icon in videos and it works. but when i select a video doesnt play. doesnt appear any error. i have n770

[Capsule]

My installation went fine. I start plugin --- do a search -- and videos appear to choose from. I choose one and video seems at is is about to start playing -- but screen stays black. Below, the video appears to be caching (purple line is moving) -- but screen stays black. I think that my problem is that I disabled Mplayer as the default video player in Canola (I didn't think that mplayer showed videos that I downloaded as smoothly as the default player). Perhaps mplayer needs to be the default video player. My question is .. . what are the instructions to reenable Mplayer as the default video player in Canola? I can't find the post that tought me how to make the change. Can someone let me know how to reenable Mplayer as the default player in Canola? Thanks.

[Capsule]

just found it . . .

Go to home/user/.atabake, edit config and change general = mplayer to general = oms. Works like a charm.

[amigokin]

@handful: 'Pick album cover from file' in beta 8?

;-)

[gtallan]

The new youtube plugin is beautifully done. It's been a lot of fun this morning searching for various videos; I never really bothered when using the regular browser/player.

Two small glitches I came across:

1) Right after starting the new canola, I initially went into the youtube bookmarks menu (don't ask me why, I knew there wouldn't be anything there). There was no back button, so it seemed impossible to get back to the previous screen (I had to quit canola). Now that I have a couple of items in the bookmarks, the back button is present and works fine.

2) I spent a bit of time doing searches, and going between videos and back to the search results. Two times I ended up trapped in the search results screen - it would scroll fine, but it wouldn't play any videos and the back button wouldn't work. Again I had to quit canola to escape.

I'm curious if anyone else experienced these problems; or if it could just be me...

Other than that, it's a really nice update.

Graham

[brontide]

YouTube complaints/bugs.

Search does not shift focus to the text dialog

Animated icons for videos appear to freeze the interface for unreasonable periods of time.

Tapping on the screen to switch between window/fullscreen often causes some sort of artifacting where I tapped.

Saves all video's to the internal card causing all sorts of issues. ( mv'ing and linking the directory is a hack ).

Still another great release.

[sachin007]

Follow Tantris instructions found earlier in the thread word for word, line for line. They are EXACTLY what you need to do, in fact short of GUI I don't think it can get any simpler than those instructions. I was having a problem due to wanting to download long content, with this fix it makes Ctube perfect.
Once again good job Marcelo and team, this program and its functionality alone makes the IT worth the money.

the problem with that is the videos i save to the memory card cannot be seen on local videos!

[mobiledivide]

the problem with that is the videos i save to the memory card cannot be seen on local videos!

Hmm I have all the videos I saved appearing under "local videos" in the c2.tube menu. They are NOT appearing under the "My Videos" tab. I initially had a problem with the symbolic link hack and ended up using Canola cleaning to delete all and then reinstalled and re linked the directories at which point it worked. I know that sounds like a PITA but it took me all of 5 minutes to do and seems to work great.

[sully]

Unfortunately I continue to have issues installing Canola 2 Beta 7. I'm running OS 2006 on a Nokia 770. I have previously tried to install Beta 6 and had the same issue. I've run canola-cleanup a few times to see if that would help, but it has not.

Nokia770-49:~# canola -vv
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/canola", line 19, in <module>
import ecore.evas
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/PIL/__init__.py", line 3, in <module>
# $Id: __init__.py 2134 2004-10-06 08:55:20Z fredrik $
ImportError: libXfixes.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

[gtallan]

When I saw the term "local" videos, I thought there was a way to put in your zip code or address and find videos that we posted from around your geographic location!

That's funny, I thought exactly the same thing! Would be quite a cool feature if it could be done.

[Tantris]

Strange enough, if you add the youtube-temp-directory to the (video-) media library then you can't see any downloaded videos under the normal "My videos"-Button, maybe it only recognizes .avi, .mpg and .mp4 but no .flv's

On my N810, however, everything works fine:
I changed my own youtube-temp directory with a symlink, I can download youtube videos and I can view them using the "local videos" in the youtube plugin.

[amigokin]

That's funny, I thought exactly the same thing! Would be quite a cool feature if it could be done.

Yes, but people will have to add the extra recorded information when they submit they videos.

Something like what some people does adding geo location in photos uploaded to flickr o google picasa wa...

But it is a great idea ;)

[Scarflash]

grrr... I just installed canola via x-term and I read somewhere that a restart might be required so I went ahead and restarted my tablet. Now when every I start my tablet, I enter my lock code, I see the two hands, then my leds flash and my tablet turns off. Anybody knows what the problem is..?

[handful]

@sully : as we have pointed here, the os2006 is really problematic, and maybe you will face a lot of problems if you had other applications / repositories installed that maybe installed several possible dependencies of canola in different versions.

This kind of case we cannot predict very well, so the only thing I can assure you is :

1) in a clean device (fresh installed) following the instructions on the website always install correctly (unless your network is really dumping on you)

2) we did what we could to help those users (canola-cleanup) but we part from the starting point that the chance that you knew what you were doing when installed each software.. : /


@other guys : the local videos is temporary. What we are doing is the following : there will be a "Downloads" folder, where ins ide you have podcast, videocast, youtube. Then in the configurations you will be able to choose the location for it.

@scarfish: this is actually a first time that we see this. Were you in red pill mode? did you have devel version of repositories enabled?

We need a lot more info to be able to help you.

@Tantris : yes indeed, media scanner doesnt search flv still. It;s on going as I said above

Marcelo

[Moonshine]

Is Canola using similar mplayer settings to those found in /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf?

For some reason playback of flash video is very different for me inside Canola vs. outside with mplayer. The original aspect ratio is lost and I get studdering inside Canola with a saved youtube video. Outside it plays smooth and with the correct 4:3 aspect ratio in mplayer by itself.

[Scarflash]

ok i've still not been able to acces my tablet, so i've reflashed it, but i wasn't able to create a backup so all my apps r gone.:mad:. so once i fllashed, i tried to install apps, but i cant. no apps can be installed.!!!!! not even skype.:mad:

[Scarflash]

i dont know what to do..... :(

[thecubed]

Scarflash, what were the exact commands you used to install Canola2?

Did you do something like apt-get upgrade? I may be wrong, but from what I have read, if you had certain repositories enabled that it would overwrite critical system packages with broken development and testing packages.

Then again, I could be completely wrong, and apt-get upgrade could be completely harmless; either way, the reflash should have fixed whatever apt-get messed with.

Did you flash with the latest 2008OS image?

[handful]

Is Canola using similar mplayer settings to those found in /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf?

For some reason playback of flash video is very different for me inside Canola vs. outside with mplayer. The original aspect ratio is lost and I get studdering inside Canola with a saved youtube video. Outside it plays smooth and with the correct 4:3 aspect ratio in mplayer by itself.

Scar, this has been widely discussed in the "streching video" post. What happens : mplayer is in "embedded" mode in canola, and due to a bug, it wasn't able to figure out correctly the format, thus stretching the video. There were hacks we could do (open mplayer 2 times) but we decided to patch (small fix) mplayer to work correctly, we did we submited to mplayer and we are waiting to it to be applied.

About performance, there's also a loss (thus for example any media player that embedds mplyaer will have a slightly worse performance than the real mplayer. We are actually not changing confs etc.

Scar: do you have n810 ? if so have you already formatted your internal disk ?

Marcelo

[Cptnodegard]

i love you people 8#

[rdcinhou]

I would also like to acknowledge Youtube video problems inside the latest Canola. Stretching is minimal compared to the sound not being in sync with the video. Stuttering only happened on one or two videos, most others were fairly smooth, just out-of-sync.

BTW...I just LOVE the YouTube browsing interface, *BUT* it only seems to scroll with your finger on the LEFT-HAND-SIDE of the display. Attempting to scroll on the right-hand-side just selects the videos. Is there anyway that the two side zones could be preferential for scrolling instead of just the left?

[sachin007]

I would also like to acknowledge Youtube video problems inside the latest Canola. Stretching is minimal compared to the sound not being in sync with the video. Stuttering only happened on one or two videos, most others were fairly smooth, just out-of-sync.

BTW...I just LOVE the YouTube browsing interface, *BUT* it only seems to scroll with your finger on the LEFT-HAND-SIDE of the display. Attempting to scroll on the right-hand-side just selects the videos. Is there anyway that the two side zones could be preferential for scrolling instead of just the left?

The bottom part of the screen where there is nothing is not touch sensitive. For best results tap and hold the screen just above the bottom part...i.e where the lower part of the listings end and drag it upwards without losing contact with the screen/

Hope this helps

[tias]

i can't copy & paste from other programs to canola. i wanted to start adding shoutcast streams but i cant use ctrl-c & ctrl-v in canola. maybe i'm missing something but to me it was the most obvious way to add stations and it doesn't work.

any thoughts?

[MikeL]

Just back to Internet civilisation, at Bordeaux Airport after a few days relaxation and have updated my N810 to Beta 7 with You-Tube plug-in. What can I say about the You-Tube plug-in, well it's "Bloody Marvelous" that's what it is! :D

So intuitive to use, with the option to save played videos :cool:

Oh and the You-tube search feature, please release the search feature for all AV media known to Canola via users guidance, both Local Folder and Internet URL/Feed related.

i.e. Search Album, Artist, Track, etc.

Must get around to updating my Canola2 user guide as there have been some great additions and improvements between early Canola2 Beta1 and Beta7!

"Keep on Trucking Guys" (Canola Team) you are really motoring now :)

[edugof]

Hi,

first congrats for the new beta, it's amazing.

And now, Are there any way to subscribe to a youtube's user?

For example: how can I subscribe to

http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/shoreserenity/videos.rss

hehe

[Modred189]

SO far every beta has worked very well for me. The You Tube plugin is flawless. My only question: is there any way to mark a video for later. like a favorites or bookmark feature?

[sachin007]

Handful please send that youtube video to engadget so that more and more people know about the coolness of canola and the n800 internet tablet.

If you want i can do that for you.

[Moonshine]

Scar, this has been widely discussed in the "streching video" post. What happens : mplayer is in "embedded" mode in canola, and due to a bug, it wasn't able to figure out correctly the format, thus stretching the video. There were hacks we could do (open mplayer 2 times) but we decided to patch (small fix) mplayer to work correctly, we did we submited to mplayer and we are waiting to it to be applied.

Thanks, I wasn't aware. :o


About performance, there's also a loss (thus for example any media player that embedds mplyaer will have a slightly worse performance than the real mplayer. We are actually not changing confs etc.

Scar: do you have n810 ? if so have you already formatted your internal disk ?

Marcelo

I have an n810 w/ 4gb minisd card installed that I boot from. I haven't reformated the internal space yet. Would that make a difference?

Thanks!

[handful]

Hi Moon,

yes there's a known bug, that n810 maybe have a interal disk that is not working proprly until you reboot, and format it.

[loaderr]

Same here. did everything by the book and I can search but when I try to play nothing plays.

Followed the instructions, and did a search for a youtube favourite of mine (achmed the dead terriorist by jeff dunham), but the video does not play.

[loaderr]

Dude thanks a lot. I have a a 2gb sd card just for this now :)

@handful, cLin
Is there anything contrary to a symlink from the canola youtube-temp-dir to, say, /media/mmc2/youtube-temp? I tested it on my device and it worked flawlessly

for those of you who want to try it (on risk and so on, and *remember* that you did this change, so you can revert it when canola has a folder chooser for this)

open an x-term shell: you are in your home direcory now.
cd .canola/youtube
create a new youtube-temp-directory, e.g. on /media/mmc2:
mkdir /media/mmc2/youtube-temp
now the "crucial part": this one deletes your normal canola temp-dir
rm -r videos
and now we create a symbolic link called "videos" which points to our newly created temp dir:
ln -s /media/mmc2/youtube-temp videos
(in caps this would be LN not 1N)

after this you should be able to do a
cd videos
echo 1 > 1

and if you open your filemanager and go to the folder in which the youtube temp-files should be stored (internal mem. card/youtube-temp)
you should see a very small file called "1" now.
Delete it, as we don't need it anymore and test your youtube videos...


To revert this change:
=================

open an x-term shell: you are in your home direcory now.
cd .canola/youtube
rm videos
mkdir videos

this will only delete the *link*, so your "new" youtube-temp directory is still there and can be deleted.

[ghoonk]

Guys, it is just my device, or does beta 7 take a lot longer to load than beta 6? beta6 took approx 15 seconds to load, while beta 7 is taking 2 to 3 minutes.

[Ricardo Malagon Jerez]

Hi, good work there.
I know a fix for many of the A/V sync problems with youtube (when video stream play a little fast, audio is ok).
Is a mplayer little problem, not canola.
For some videos in flv container (youtube for example) mplayer needs the experimental parameter -correct-pts. It works in the last version of mplayer, maybe in the older one too.

Note: Some videos in youtube have true sync problems, this fix is only for the mplayer bug with some flv videos.

I don't know how to config atabake to add extra parameters to mplayer. But maybe this can help the Youtube Plugin team.

[genome4hire]

Ok, one more problem with the new beta, this time dealing with podcasts.

under beta 6, two rss feeds that I made worked.
Now, they no longer work. This is a regression
http://www.dubfire.net/feeds/tal.xml
http://www.dubfire.net/feeds/tal-no-reruns.xml

The error I'm given is: "URL is no feed: application/xml"

Please look into this.

Thanks

Chris

[handful]

Genome : we will take a look, but this message indicates that the server is returning the wrong mime-type. did you change anything your servers that host your feeds?

Anyways we will look and see, but we have a huge list of "problematic" podcast that acts like a test, to avoid this kind of stuff, but unfortunately podcast feeds are so messy, that we may have fall into a regression indeed.

Marcelo

[briand]

Marcelo --

Every once in a while, while browsing YouTube (mostly), the program becomes semi-unresponsive. By that, I mean that I can scroll through the list of videos presented, but cannot select one. Usually the "back" button also becomes inactive at this time, so the only way out is to close canola from the pop-up home menu (which I can reach via the hardware 'home' button).

When this occurs, the application is still getting keystrokes (finger strokes?? ;)), because the highlight will 'follow', as I'm scrolling, and (momentarily) highlight when I try to select. The audio feedback ("click") is also present when this happens.

I don't have a fully repeatable scenario... but it seems to happen after I've been playing in canola for a while, perhaps 15 or 20 videos, a couple searches, etc. Please let me know if you need further description (or testing, experimentation, etc) regarding this...

[jabastien]

I experienced the same as briand last night. Canola remains fully operational, I'm able to play musics view pictures and streaming audio. When I go back to youtube, Canola returns to the last state youtube was. Restarting canola seems to remedy the plugin for another 10 to 15 video downloads and playback.

Thanks,
Jabastien
:cool:

[handful]

Hi Guys (Briand and jabastien) this seems to be "a pattern", so we will for sure investigate it further, to try to repeat and fix the bug.

thanks, this is a more complex scenario and without your help we would never be able to do it in such detail.

Marcelo

[spice3d]

Marcelo: Not sure if you saw my post, but I'm getting this odd volume spike at the very beginning of a song. I also notice that the volume indicator appears to start at 100% and then goes back to where it was set before. Any thoughts. I must just be me since I haven't seen anyone else post this issue.

[handful]

Hi Spice3d, I got it, we tried replicating and fixing what happened in some cases, but as you are reporting again, it seems that we are not quite there.

There's a kwnon issue (of a maemo deamon, settings the volume back) and we cannot "deal" with this deamon, so can you please try the following :
set the volume on the DEFAULT media player to zero or near zero, and see if you can reproduce the error ?

What happens is : we send the command to "change volume" or when starting a song we make sure to set the volume to your last used value. It took us some hours to identify what was happening : the default media ENGINE receives the command, set the sound downs, but then the default media PLAYER deamon, goes there and set it back to it's previous volume! Funny huh? thus we need to set it back again. I don't know if Morpheuz has reported this bug to the maemo guys, but now at least you know how to 'reduce" it if that is your case!

Marcelo

[Mika73]

Beautiful and amazing. I love it! I also received the OUT OF SPACE message after watching 3 YouTube videos.

I got that one time too.

[koree555]

Hi everyone, I cannot install the youtube plug-in, keeps saying "unable to install canola3 youtube plugin. I have unistalled even canola3 base and reinstalled, but keep getting this messge. I am so anxious to see this work, so if anyone has any ideas much appreciated......
Thanks

[handful]

Hi, about the out of space: we are working in the "choose your download folder" in the settings, so for now you can try setting a link to another folder. It saves today on internal memory which is quite small.

about not bein able to install: please send us at least your log. Did you follow the right sequence? 1st the update to beta7, then update all used themes, then you tube?

cheers

[Laughing Man]

Does watching a youtube video download it and keep it? Or does watching a youtube video download it, then delete it?

[sjgadsby]

This is just an oddity I've noticed in this and previous Canola2 betas (and two different batteries):

Charge tablet to "Battery full" and keep charger connected.
Launch Canola2. A D-Bus "Charging" message will display as Canola starts up.
Quit Canola.
Leave the tablet sitting idle on the charger. The tablet will not achieve "Battery full" again.


The workaround is to disconnect and reconnect the charger, which is simple enough, but why does this happen? Does it have to do with Canola having its own, internal battery meter?

[handful]

@laughing it : it keeps it in the cache for a while until you watch a new one (then replaces the cache)

The youtube downloaded video location and cache is a real issue, and we will run to fix it.

Br

Marcelo

[belloc]

I can't even get the base repository to install on my Nokia 810 :( Should I try a manual install? Can someone post directions for a newbie?

[handful]

Hi belloc, first make sure you have formatted you internal memory , this will fix a known issue... Then make sure you have only the needed repositories ( maemo and maemo extras ) then try again!

cheers

marcelo

[spice3d]

...please try the following :
set the volume on the DEFAULT media player to zero or near zero, and see if you can reproduce the error ?

Yup, that does the trick... I'll just need to remember to reset if I use the media player directly. Thanks.

[iliaden]

my feedback on Beta7:

- All the themes I have (flat black, graphite & marbles) do not show either of the two lower buttons (back & options). I can access the back button by the hardware key, but have no link for the options menu; any solution?
- album entries work a bit better (recognized multiple entries for 1 more album; 3 to go!
(note: I created the ID3 tags myself, all tracks being tagged with an identical album title)
- maemo extras repository required for installation of youtube plugin is offline :S
- video playback still less efficient than MPlayer; did not notice any difference with beta6
- non-unicode characters perfectly supported (edit for my previous post)
- youtube works OK (exceeds my expectations to be honest). Was unable to try all the features due to lack of options menu.


Timeline : We have at least one more big update for march, we will release youtube and last.fm first (they were actually developed as example for the developers), and after that, I'm planning how much we are able to do in the other sprints. So imagine that we will try really now the 2 or 3 weeks interval (testing is taking a huge amount of time) so I see some of these features coming in the 2nd and 3rd sprint after the following one (beta7)


I did not yet find the Last.FM plugin. Is this planned for soon?

Keep up the good work

Ilia

[slip]

After using Beta 7 for a few days, I've now started to experience some problems. Sometimes when starting Canola, it will hang on "Loading" for a very long time, so that I end up having to close it from the swap button. This problem is intermittent, so I don't really have any more information to provide unfortunately, but I figured I should let the team know.
Hopefully the next version, with the download folder, will clear things up.
Still my favorite app on the N800!

[iliaden]

Me too, I experience long load times. However, I should mention that I boot from mmc, and that the metalayer-crawler process struggles with my mp3 files for ~45 minutes after boot, so loading times of ~1min for canola are more than acceptable for me.
Note: the metalayer-crawler problem has NOTHING to do with canola; it's a system process for identifying mp3 and their ID3. the time it take on my device is astronomical for yet unknown reasons :(

Anyways, I noticed another problem: when I play saved youtube media, and click on the options button (complete reinstall of canola did not solve the problem; afterwards I rebooted and the problem disappeared...), the menu comes below the video.
In the screenshot, the video is completely green; that's a problem with the screenshot-taking tool i'm using. on my screen, there's the video with the menu below it.

hope you have enough time to take a look.

Good luck

Ilia

[handful]

@iliaden :

- All the themes I have (flat black, graphite & marbles) do not show either of the two lower buttons (back & options). I can access the back button by the hardware key, but have no link for the options menu; any solution?

We are looking into this issue. We don't know exactly what is happening, but we did already some changes to the themes, to see if is in the theme files and also, removed some bindings that toogles the lower bar. If you are using the n810 try typing some letters in that screen (I forgot exactly which ones) the bar will show and hide :/


- album entries work a bit better (recognized multiple entries for 1 more album; 3 to go!
(note: I created the ID3 tags myself, all tracks being tagged with an identical album title)

Can you send the last 3? (sorry for the work), but it's the best way to find the bugs on our code :)


- maemo extras repository required for installation of youtube plugin is offline :S

This is beyond our control, and to avoid even bigger problems we cannot setup one for us.

- video playback still less efficient than MPlayer; did not notice any difference with beta6

This is also a mplayer issue. Mplayer when embedded mode does reduces performance. We are slowing doing researches on how to fix it, and also considering one new backend with the same (probably) performance but with a real API, easier to control and to avoid bugs.

- non-unicode characters perfectly supported (edit for my previous post)

Nice.

- youtube works OK (exceeds my expectations to be honest). Was unable to try all the features due to lack of options menu.

If you tried all options there, those were all the options. theres no way to implement everything at once right? and we started with a basic set, and now we will include a little more as needed by the users. Sort the search results, maybe comments, choose the downloads folder and maybe feeds will be probably implemented.


@slip

After using Beta 7 for a few days, I've now started to experience some problems. Sometimes when starting Canola, it will hang on "Loading" for a very long time, so that I end up having to close it from the swap button. This problem is intermittent, so I don't really have any more information to provide unfortunately, but I figured I should let the team know.
Hopefully the next version, with the download folder, will clear things up.
Still my favorite app on the N800!


Slip: did you try at once letting the " loading" go for more time? (I know it sucks ) but for us there's a huge difference between hanging and taking 5-10 minutes.

Do you have a huge card? We are planning to include a "advanced" mode that turns off the library integrity check in the beginning, making it even faster to start up canola, but then make sure to refresh manually your library if you did any changes.

@iliaden:


Me too, I experience long load times. However, I should mention that I boot from mmc, and that the metalayer-crawler process struggles with my mp3 files for ~45 minutes after boot, so loading times of ~1min for canola are more than acceptable for me.
Note: the metalayer-crawler problem has NOTHING to do with canola; it's a system process for identifying mp3 and their ID3. the time it take on my device is astronomical for yet unknown reasons


Iliaden, thanks for clarifying that. Just to make sure, we have been so crazy about the optimizing the scanner, that in our last benchmarks we did we were already really fast. If I'm not mistaken, but I will not take this as official, as the others can have some bugs with out " test media " card, created with some of the files sent by you, LMS was considerably faster than the other scanners (in the other media players).


Anyways, I noticed another problem: when I play saved youtube media, and click on the options button (complete reinstall of canola did not solve the problem; afterwards I rebooted and the problem disappeared...), the menu comes below the video.
In the screenshot, the video is completely green; that's a problem with the screenshot-taking tool i'm using. on my screen, there's the video with the menu below it.

hope you have enough time to take a look.


This goes back to the point that we need a reliable media playback engine. Unfortunately in our estimatives it would take 3 months to have one working with the performance near mplayer (based on libXine) but this would end with our problems related to this.

At least we are trying the possible : find the bugs even on other softwares and sending patches to try to fix it, the other projects have been great on talking to us, and this will improve over time.

Anyways, again thanks for a very detailed feedback

Marcelo

[belloc]

Hi belloc, first make sure you have formatted you internal memory , this will fix a known issue... Then make sure you have only the needed repositories ( maemo and maemo extras ) then try again!

cheers

marcelo

Marcelo I reformatted my internal memory card but that didn't seem to solve the issue. I ran the Canola cleanup routine and that seemed to unclog things. I was able to install everything and it's up and running. Love it so far!

-Chuck

[sjgadsby]

- All the themes I have (flat black, graphite & marbles) do not show either of the two lower buttons (back & options).
We are looking into this issue. We don't know exactly what is happening, but we did already some changes to the themes, to see if is in the theme files and also, removed some bindings that toogles the lower bar.

I can replicate the issue with Flat Black* by having another application eating up processor cycles as Canola loads. Launching MicroB from a bookmark of Internet Tablet Talk's main page and then launching Canola does the trick for me. If Canola doesn't have to fight for processor time as it starts up, the bottom buttons appear.

* I haven't tried the other themes.

[handful]

Hi sjg,

This is a really helpful feedback. Now we can take a much better look at the issue!

Thanks!

marcelo

[iliaden]

Hi,

You asked for album problems - I uploaded one album that is not recognized as one. the link is: http://adrive.com/public/7528276f437ae56f5dc0ddd71fe14ea9aabd3bb2891a992cdd 6a566879c787d8.html
ID3 tags were constructed based on the filename, and the "album" for all the tracks was the same ("FRANCE").
All the tracks (or almost) are in french, 56kbps, mono. I usually lower the music quality to fit more songs on one mmc, specially since I cannot hear the difference.

Hope this helps

Ilia

[handful]

Thanks Iliaden,

Downloaded, we will check it .

BR

Marcelo

[munky261]

iliaden , you can just totally disable the metalayer-crawler , i did and general performance is ALOT better

[Nif]

Hi, I am sorry if this is off topic a little, but how do I get the media scanner to recognize .flv videos (I have some Youtube videos downloaded from before the Youtube plugin, which I would like to be able to view through Canola).

Thanks in advance
Patrick

[handful]

Nif : we are going to add support on the next release (probably :) ) it's just a matter of adding one string to the scanner configs if I'm not mistaken.

But don't worry as we are adding the options to choose your downloads folder it will be also already scanned for the flv files.

Br

Marcelo

[wzzrd]

Hi handful,

during the test of beta5 I found some song (a lot really) that were not found by Canola. You then asked me to send the to you. What mailaddress should I mail them to?

[handful]

my emaill is in gmail : handful

:) did you test on beta7 and still not finding it?

Marcelo

[vvaz]

N800, OS2007, latest stable release

Concentrating on YT plugin

- had problems with libdownloadmanager0*, lightmediascanner0-id3lib, after some googling solved
- after two-three clips whole tablet crashes (not always reproducible but happened three times after one hour of using)
- why you rescale videos to panoramic proportions? most videos are in classic 4:3, look ugly and only adds CPU problems
- sometimes very long delay between click on video and visible start of buffering without any feedback to the user
- in grey theme buffering slider is almost invisible
- wrong calculation of video length, last few seconds are clipped; for example Chris de Burgh Don't pay the ferryman uploaded by Starlord1999 is 3:20 but Canola reports 3:13 and plays up to ca 3:17 with funny effects for right side counter
- no way to jump in video (eg from 53rd sec to 1:43)?

Irritating things but this is really first non-sucking YT interface :)

Keep up good work!

[handful]

@vvaz : the crash was due to what? can you run with -vv on xterm try crashing it again to see if it is the "out of memory" problem ?

2) please, read the threads :)) we do not scale, it's a bug on embedded mplayer. We already fixed (on mplayer) but mplayer didn't released the new version with this fix. The only other way to fix it is too much of a hack (start mplayer, find the proportion, close mplayer and then restart it again with the right proportion).

3) We are working on improving that, but again sometimes is beyond us, I can assure you that my work is this, to provide a nice user experience, and I'm REALLY into details, and when they are possible to implement we do it asap, but in this case, we need to ask mplayer to open, start fetching the file, and seems that the cpu goes to right before the loading sign appears. We are always looking for this small things and there are already a lot to fix, but the best solution is to have a more "controlled" media engine, mplayer is too independent from us. That's why we are experimenting with lib xine, because has the same (probably) possible performance as mplayer and more control for the application embedding it.

4) nice comment, we will see what we can do (actually to have some kind of outline for clearer themes )

5) This is also completely on mplayer, we do what we can to help the project.

4) Seek (or jump) is REALLY messy on the FLV support of mplayer. you can take a look on the page of the youtube browser application for maemo :
"We need help with seek" :) so again, it's beyond our control in current mplayer.

5) I can guarantee that they irritate me even more :) because I have been using canola since way before it goes plublic and everything that I complain comes from the fact that we are independent from the render engine, and it's not easy to make one (actually for us would be almost impossible) and we are at least not stalled, praying for a solution, we are actually here with some xine developer + one of our guys doing a study to see the viability of having this.

Thanks for the nice and detailed comments!

Marcelo

[spice3d]

Marcelo: I'm sure that has been suggested but I'll say it anyways, Album Art should be a viewing mode, not a separate method of viewing music. So, if I want to see Artists, Albums, Genres, etc., I should have a choice of viewing by text or album art.

[vvaz]

@handful

Well, since whole tablet is rebooting after crash I cannot produce any logs. I managed to crash it once more - happened when some other apps were opened, web browser, fbreader, spend-it. Probably this out-of-memory problem.

Grey theme is very good, only this buffering slider is problem.

Never did any regular tests (only ps output) but Kaffeine (http://kaffeine.kde.org) - heavy duty GUI KDE media player based on xine was using less memory than mplayer when viewing the same DVD.

One more problem: started Canola without net connection, Search YT, "cannot locate server". Canola couldn't force tablet to connect on its own. Minimize app, connect to net manually, return to Canola, repeat search, still cannot find server. Had to restart Canola to detect net connection.

[handful]

spice3D : I think it was said in different words, but don't worry :
You mean : if you are looking into a list of artists, you want to see a album art icon besides the name right (not the grid correct) ?

But genres? if we do that we need to pick a random album art? that maybe cannot say much about the genre? sorry but I really disagree of the use here.

Albums make sense, and they are already by album art, but maybe what we can implement in the future is the album art by artists. I think that is missing for sure.

Br

Marcelo

[handful]

Never did any regular tests (only ps output) but Kaffeine (http://kaffeine.kde.org) - heavy duty GUI KDE media player based on xine was using less memory than mplayer when viewing the same DVD.

well we have some tests on the tablet. It uses the same ffmpeg codecs (if I am not saying ********) but the goal for us is a easier to use API. if the performance is better than the default media player is alright still :) I want to speed up loading time, control better, have more control over bugs and be able to fix / patch it more often.



One more problem: started Canola without net connection, Search YT, "cannot locate server". Canola couldn't force tablet to connect on its own. Minimize app, connect to net manually, return to Canola, repeat search, still cannot find server. Had to restart Canola to detect net connection.

We will not force canola to connect. this was an early decision and we don't want to force this for now. But the need to restart canola is a important thing. I will talk to the guys to fix this.

Marcelo

[vvaz]

Several other issues (more general, not tied to Beta7):

1. Battery usage. Mplayer shortens battery life, I wonder how xine is doing in that field. While I don't like default Nokia apps they hit one thing perfectly - power usage. Built-in media player is very power efficient. Would it be possible to switch to it automatically for supported formats?

2. Another issue bothering me for long time. When "escaping" from track I land into playlist/album view and don't know in what part of playlist I am. IMO currently played track should be highlighted AND for few seconds slider should be shown for better orientation. Current track should be placed in middle of screen or second to show context.

3. To identify albums Canola uses combination of album title AND artist which leads to absurd effects. For example soundtrack of Shrek 2 is shown in Canola as 13 albums! The same applies to albums where are invited guests etc.

4. Scrolling is erratical. Everything works well with light load of device, but with anything going into background (or sometimes even just playing) IT has problems with detection of events and the only way to scroll without accidentally entering selection is use of "safe zone" on the left. Problem is this area is too narrow to comfortably use. Sure, it is wider than corresponding widgets in rest of Hildon interface but it is narrower than similar elements of Canola. This area should be wider AND on both sides.

[handful]

@vvaz : It already does that automatically. It only uses mplayer as default because it has better performance for video. There's a atabake .conf file on your home folder ( .atabake/.conf if I'm not mistaken) that does the mime type associations.
Audio : most of formats play with default media player because it's more efficient.
Video : most formats play with mplayer because of better performance.

You can try setting up the basic video formats to the default media player.

2. Actually we have this since the first design, and it became a programming / performance issue. I asked for the icon to show that that particular song is playing, but there's some problems with implementing that now. It's on our list of fixes for the list component. But I agree with you that the scrollbar should stay a little bit more, and we will do that, actually it was talked in beta7 that it should be at least semi-transparent most of the time. We are prototyping that to see the best solution.

3. Please, read the threads :) the multiple album solutions out there a based on "players" on the desktop particular tags. To avoid that we became "agnostic" to those and tried to do the most generic / id3 compliant solution. EVEN with that there's a small feature in the settings part ( multiple album entries ) that willl fix this automatically for you allowing you to merge any album that shows duplicated. It uses not only the principles you said, but others.

I know most of people never read it (myself included sometimes) but it was already on the canola "manual" : http://www.openbossa.indt.org/canola/using.html#mlib

If there's a solution that 100% for all cases, we will implement. while this do not appear we will slowly improve according to the standards of each tag implementation.

ps: we tried a lot of possible combinations, and there's always a case that fails.

4. This was widely discussed in several threads, and I explained not only the design decisions but also the whole concept decision why there will be not a wider area there, and so on. So, again as I said before: if you don't mind... use "it would be nice if.." and not "should". We are doing our best following our concept / goal for the application. It's unfortunately impossible to please everyone, and I will personally not change the plans I have for it for now.

The good part is that the IT provides lot's of choice, and as we don't charge any money for the application you can change without loss to the other applications that implement that kind of thing. I know it's a high price to pay to lose a user (and I really care about it) but I do not think we compete with other players, with complete each other. Kagu has a simple 2 click solution to avoid miss click, media box has a simple "play" are on the item to avoid miss click and they are all nice applications that does what we do... (and they are done in python, which makes us quite happy because we are python advocates ) and can guarantee that you would at least solve this problem.

Did you try with the flat themes? they speed up things and behave better in heavy load cpu situations.

Anyways, your point 2 is really valid, and help us improving Canola and also validates what we thought was wrong. We thank you very much for the time / effort on using reporting the problems to us.

*ps: i hope you don't take my words as rudeness, in the opposite we are all searching for a nice user experiences, so if we cannot fulfill it we for sure give alternative ways to do it.

Cheers,

Marcelo

[nokian111]

how can i find and back up (or play with another player) the youtube files.
i couldn't locate them with the file manager...

i ran into the same "out of space" issue too... i moved the nokia demo
video and could load a few more youtube files...

[vvaz]

4. This was widely discussed in several threads, and I explained not only the design decisions but also the whole concept decision why there will be not a wider area there, and so on. So, again as I said before: if you don't mind... use "it would be nice if.." and not "should". We are doing our best following our concept / goal for the application. It's unfortunately impossible to please everyone, and I will personally not change the plans I have for it for now.


Well, it would be nice if app like Canola provided the same interface for whole experience. With such narrow "safe zone" it is impossible.


*ps: i hope you don't take my words as rudeness, in the opposite we are all searching for a nice user experiences, so if we cannot fulfill it we for sure give alternative ways to do it.


Rude would be "naked" RTFM without any further explanation :)

And flat theme is real improvement in terms of performance. Thanks.

[handful]

Hi vvaz,

We do provide it, and like I posted in several threads, the scrolling thing is "variable" there's users with problems, there's users with no problem, there are users that have not "grasped" the way to scroll safely, and so on. The thing is, that was not even supposed to be a safe zone, it's a happening. The right side is dedicated to widgets and to the important matter of showing the bar indicating where you are.

So, if things are like this I would really provide the same experience, removing the safe zone, but I don't consider this to be harmful as for example it works for you at least a little bit.

Again, canola suffers also from one evil : we tried to be a "capacitive-ready" ui on a resistive touch device. This is our sin, and to fix that we would need to deeply redesign, and as I'm looking more into the future, and future evolutions I think it was worth the experiment to have this, even with failures. My team and I have learned a lot about the scrolling issues, scrolling technics, and we will be prepared for the future / future projects because our goal was really to be different, be equal means to use some of the concepts of the others players, but if you have them I should we do the same... that's what's nice about maemo : freedom of choice, and we are more than glad with the outcomes, and I think we will be able to improve it a lot more to even make you happier with the scrolling thing :)

If we had a "canola" device (I know 'if' is a easy resort) there would not be that much thing bellow blocking the interaction like in your case, but I can promise you one thing : we are not stopped, let this get worse .. we are trying and experimenting with everything possible to improve it, in the coding level. In the design level we will not change unless is really necessary in some points

Eg given of ITT suggestion that changed the design :

a) the accidental hit of delete button in the settings, now it will hide automatically
b) lack of some user feedback in several interactions
c) changes on the album art size, text movements etc
d) changes on hit areas of elements to improve success rate
e) changes on the scrollbar, made numbers bigger, gave more space to back and option buttons
and a lot more, trying always to cope with the basic concept :)

I'm glad you didn't find it rude. Yes, a RTFM is a little bit too much. And as I don';t like to read it, I won't write it for others :)

Anyways dude, just your time of talking to me, pointing out your ideas / comments is already taken as a great thing for us. And as you know it's nothing personal / against users but more a thing of knowing that the fix is not as simple as people think when looking from outside. We have a small joke inside from devs to interaction designers that is something like that :

"Please Dev, do that for me... it's probably just an 'if' on your code "

:)

Cheers dude,

Marcelo

[Dmitri]

Ah! So Youtube plugin uses Mplayer?
I was wondering why it worked with my bluetooth headphones.
While Youtube doesn't have stereo (or is it me?), it was pretty good experience.

After that, of course, I immediately started regretting that a2dp hack doesn't work with Canola... :(

Oh, and I'm really glad to see new themes. My favorite so far is Deep Blue.

P.S. This is my first post here. ;)

[handful]

Hi Dmitri,

We wanted a2dp since the beginning, but as you know canola is cpu intensive in most of interactions (scrolling mainly) using today's a2dp support would make the experience totally crap, then we went to do the right thing :

We had one guy working just to improve the performance of the a2dp profile straight in the blueZ project (the bluetooth stack for linux, used in the tablets).

We had excellent results, the performance is now very very nice, and once the new blueZ is on the tablet (next release we think) we will put the support on Canola by default, with controls :)

It's our way, we don't like that much "hacks" :) I know we pissed some users off because of that, but you can do a hack on canola : set mplayer as player of everything (audio and video) it is not recommend but will give you today's a2dp hack a chance :)

I hope with the testing environment + the web service for compile themes + the design sheets, more themes will appear :)

cheers, and welcome!

Marcelo

[jabastien]

OpenBossa Labs Team,

First of all thank you for a great application (Canola) and I look forward for the next release. But, I have some suggestions that I would like in Canola.
I use Miro on my PC and I'd like some of the functionality implemented in Canola.
Like the following:
- Auto delete podcast after preset number of days
- Ability to keep the podcast after until user decide to delete the file, a button on the playback screen will be handy while driving
- Auto download NEW podcast from preset feed

These functionalities will be a must in the desktop version.

Thanks again,
Jacques

[handful]

Hi Jabastien, I will comment your suggestions :)

a) yes, this is a nice idea, we can add to podcast backlog for future releases ( on front still : implement a way to show the episode descriptions, debugging and error handling on downloads, and more options (download all, delete all etc)

b) I think we do that already :) if you downloaded it will be there, so I guess you're saying something like (mark as "keepable" eheheh) right? so it won't get deleted by the first suggestion?

c) yes, this is already on the backlog (was asked by lots of people) we have just a small concern, but I think we will leave this to use. If you enable auto downloads, canola will download the last episode in the background until downloads all feeds's latest episodes) so people will need to be careful when connecting using the cellphone data plans with no unlimited usage :)))))

Again : we will not make a desktop version :) canola UI as it is, is completely made for touchscreen. While I did most of the decisions based on the fact that it could be controlled with a 4-way rocker + 3 buttons ( a remote ) Canola today is only suitable for real use on touchscreen devices (there's no selection / focus in elements and some screens don't make much sense in real desktop size )

The desktop version is purely for testing purposes of third party plugins and themes :)

Cheers,

Marcelo

[AstralStorm]

Well, Canola2 beta 7 works fine except for Ogg/Vorbis support.
I do have working Vorbis support in the Nokia player (ogg-support), mplayer can also play the file. Canola doesn't notice the files, though. Any way to fix it?

[handful]

Astral,

IT was missing the package for the LMS (scanner) to recompile and repackaged, we are sorry for this huge mistake, but it;s going to be solved in the next week release.

BR

Marcelo

[iliaden]

more feedback:
I have [recently] posted a few screenshots of the missing bottom buttons. Someone replied saying that they disappear when the CPU is loaded with some other process.

My feedback is that it's not the case: started my IT; waited 5 minutes after complete boot to make sure; ran Canola... same problem!

Also, I noticed another program flaw: SOMETIMES (trying to find the cause; yet unsuccessful), when using canola to play local audio, the back button stops working. Note: this is a software problem since it does not respond to neither the onscreen button, the hardware button, or any "left" input over bluetooth (cell phone & keyboard). This problem may occur right after staring canola, or after some time using it.

P.S. metalayer-crawler is disabled; does not affect canola performance AT ALL.
P.P.S. metalayer-crawler is a system process that reads media info (ID3) for the default media player... VERY resource-hungry process for an un-optimized media player.

Btw, Canola's media playback optimization is also mediocre (wish i could say more), since it ofter (once every ~3 min) lags for 1/4 sec on local mp3 playback.

Is there any codec/library I should install to fix this?

thanks

Ilia

[handful]

iliaden,

The bad news : we (as I said before) don't play the mp3s. At all. Your mp3s if you didn't change you conf file (people do that to use bluetooth a2dp) uses the SAME codecs, actually the same engine as the default media player. The only thing different is that we send commands through DBUS, while the default media player don't need to do that.

But I need you do one last thing : let it play without interact : see if it also lag as you said.

Why am I asking that : when on idle, canola uses almost no CPU, thus it shouldn't be problematic. The codecs are exactly the same, as we really send " play " to media engine.

I think we fixed some of the problems of the missing buttons, we were able to reproduce sometimes, but I will see if we can find this back problem.

you said you tried even bluetooth... are you using bluetooth always, when those problems happens?

PPS : we are intimate friends to the metalayer -crawler :)

We are aware that canola is cpu intensive, but we have been using canola on brand new n800s and n810 with only the problems everyone faces... so it's has been quite a challenge to us to replicate some of the issues you said to try to kill any bug that maybe causing them. Sometimes they can be tied to a simple detail... so the more we talk the more we can find this trigger and try to see what can be done to solve it.

Conclusion : canola media " playback " doesn't exist. We use our " media " layer (atabake) just to " send " comaands to the current playback " engine" that is by default : maemo media engine , so any other application using maemo media engine should be facing the same problems in your device, IF it was not cpu related. This is the only thing canola does " different " we use more cpu while animating screens.

So if you can tell me more details, of this lags... when they happen (swtiching from screen to screen : which screens? if it's the photos.. how many thumbnails...)

And just to remind me : you use Os2008 + n810 correct?

BR

Marcelo

[Alphaman]

Hi Handful,

Just a house-keeping suggestion here:

Next time you make a version announcement, how about making multiple new related threads:


Announcing Canola beta 8
Installation instructions and issues for beta 8
Photo issues for beta 8
Music issues for beta 8
Podcast issues for beta 8
Video issues for beta 8
YouTube issues for beta 8


I just waded through 15 pages of posts to make sure there weren't any updates on the specific YouTube issues. :( 15 pages in a little over a week! This kind of "one thread to rule them all" can be painful, especially since we've got a whole dedicated forum for Canola.

Just a constructive suggestion! :)

P.S. I love Canola! When I want to show off my IT, this is the app I'm most likely to bring up!

[handful]

Alphaman: the problem is that : people even with that tends to post without searching : /

But nice suggestion, we will adopt it.

Br

MArcelo

[PaulRay]

This Beta is fantastic!
I love showing it to my co-workers. Everyone says "Oooh! AaaH!"
Canola makes my already cool N810 rock.
I've had it for several days now and I won't suggest any fixes since I know you're already working on them. :o)
Thanks!!

[handful]

Hi Paul :)

Thanks in behalf of everyone working on it :) and yes lot's of improvement coming!

Br

Marcelo

[wazd]

Well, I think desktop Canola would be awesome way for built-in Car-puter system ;)

[handful]

yeah, in that sense you can use the build we are going to release :)

Br

Marcelo

[ylsf]

I did a search for "Resume" through this forum but didn't see any talk of it. Not sure if it was talked about in different terms...

What I would love to see is a "auto-resume" function when you load up a file that you had been playing before to resume back where you left off. Or, a way to add a "bookmark" to your current spot and resume back from that spot.

Also, I have been trying to figure out what the 4 squares are in the top right hand corner??

[italodance]

handful

finally i nistalled canola 2 beta1 tonight! (i couldn't install beta 7 right now)

two problems:


first it can't read my photos on mmc2 gallery folder (maybe they are more pics yes? and i need to select 2 par folders)

second the video player is Dedicated to my Mplayer! i want for Media Player!??? what can i do?


please help tnx!

[handful]

Hi ylsf :

The resume is already present in podcast and if I'm not mistaken in videos as well. Anyhow it only remembers the last played, thus is not a bookmark feature.

We have some plans for that, but while there is more serious problems to solve, this feature will remain on the queue.

The explanation for the 4 squares :

Canola official site manual :

http://www.openbossa.indt.org/canola/using.html#busage


My personal blog where I comment a lot about canola's UI design decisions :

Here (http://www.marceloeduardo.com/blog/design/user-interface-design/crazy-days-you-know-why)

Br

Marcelo

[handful]

@italo : sorry but I will not be able to help you too much on beta1 issues, take a look in the beginning of the forum maybe you will find something.

to change from mplayer to the default media player please edit the file ~/.atabake/conf

about the not finding pictures, you checked the correct foldes on your media library settings and they do not appear?

What is happening that you are not able to install beta7? and from where are you installing beta1??? from that alternative repository? (if so it's probably because of this)

Marcelo

[italodance]

@italo : sorry but I will not be able to help you too much on beta1 issues, take a look in the beginning of the forum maybe you will find something.

to change from mplayer to the default media player please edit the file ~/.atabake/conf

about the not finding pictures, you checked the correct foldes on your media library settings and they do not appear?

What is happening that you are not able to install beta7? and from where are you installing beta1??? from that alternative repository? (if so it's probably because of this)

Marcelo


yes freind the photo promlem is solved it just can't read 1 pic and so all the full folder gallery couldn't read photos

i just removed and solved! (strange yes?)

and i am going for video now....


by the way i installed canola 2 by my application manager from

http://repo.maemo.chatonka.com/chinook/testing/

[handful]

Well,

why you didn't install the beta7? it has been more than 3 months of development, and we are far ahead of that release ! : / also the fact that you installed via this repository will generate more problems when you decide to update : /

This photo problem for example, was told here and fixed on beta3 if I'm not mistaken! : /

MArcelo

[italodance]

Well,

why you didn't install the beta7? it has been more than 3 months of development, and we are far ahead of that release ! : / also the fact that you installed via this repository will generate more problems when you decide to update : /

This photo problem for example, was told here and fixed on beta3 if I'm not mistaken! : /

MArcelo


friend here is my bug: https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3029

i contacted to official nokia house here and told them about my problem here and they promised to fix it for me!



Dear Mr. Darabi,

Thank you for emailing Nokia Careline.

It is unfortunate to hear of the difficulties that you have been
experiencing with your Nokia mobile. We apologize for any inconvenience that
this may have caused you and thank you for bringing this to our
attention.

In the meantime, kindly be informed that your issue has been escalated
to the relevant department. We will revert to you as soon as a
resolution is reached.

Should you require any further assistance, please do not hesitate to
contact the Nokia Careline and speak to any of our Customer Service
Executives on the following numbers:

From Tehran (via landline): 23013

From Tehran (via mobile): 021 23013

Outside Tehran (via landline): 021 23013

Outside Tehran (via mobile): 021 23013

Between the hours of 10am and 9 pm (local time), Saturdays to
Thursdays. For on-line assistance, please visit â€کASK Nokia’ at our website
www.nokia.com.

Register with Nokia Connections and you will receive a bimonthly fun
newsletter about the latest products and events. Click below to register.
http://mea.nokia.com/A4211102


hope soon! :( do u remember me? i asked about offline insatlation once

[italodance]

wait friend please can u upload all package for canola 2 beta 7 (tha last version) on another website for me?

please possible?

then i can update my beta 1 to beta 7 with my application Manager! (is it right? yes?)


i can't...how can i change from mplayer to the default media player?

~/.atabake/conf ??????? please a teach here! tnx

[iliaden]

Hi Marcelo,

first, with the reminder: n800, OS2008.

about the lag: occurs on flat ground: no open programs; after the lag, I immediately switched to desktop, which showed me a standard cpu load (~10%). I use Canola only for audio playback... along with youtube after your new (great!) add-on. I just leave the device , buttons & screen locked, and the lag still occurs. If you are interested, the only additions that are always running on my device are : personalmenu, advanced-backlight, load-appelet & personal-menu, along with 3 desktop appelets: GPE summary, clock, FMradio.
I thought that GPE summary might be interfering, so I disabled it. The lag did not yet occur... will keep "testing" ;)

I mentioned bluetooth: when using my n800 as a music player, I connect it via bluetooth to my cell phone, and use my cell as a remote. Imput that I can send from my cell is: 4-direction arrow, "home" key, enter, escape ("back" key).

If you could add the option to control the volume using up/down, this would greatly simplify my life (no need to get it out of my pocket, unlock, set the volume, lock again...)

Next... the lag is not at all associated to bluetooth use... or at least I haven't discovered this yet. The disappearance of the bottom buttons, might be... will give feedback in ~1-2 days.
I never use my bluetooth keyboard with Canola (with one single exception mentioned in my last post), and i'm not planning to, unless you need feedback there (gladly willing to help).


PPS : we are intimate friends to the metalayer -crawler

WHAT!?!? it's my worst enemy!!!!

Actually, before I killed it for good, it ate a few hours of CPU, 100% load, after I inserted a media card in the slot.

Also, a few questions regarding the youtube plugin (works great, btw)
1) where does it store saved files?
2) what format does it save video files?
3) the filename of the saved files (if there is something in particular)
4) how does it index those files? along with the rest of audio, video & images or does it just recall the previous settings?
5) is there any way of modifying the location (from internal flash, as I figured it out) to memory card (either mmc1 or mmc2...)?

thank you

Ilia

[ylsf]

Thanks for the response. I found out that the "resume" function is there now as I was playing around with some media files. The thing is I need to still "browse" through to find it and load up that file. It would be nice to be able to set an option to "re-open previously playing file on startup" or something like that....

[briand]

Also, a few questions regarding the youtube plugin (works great, btw)
1) where does it store saved files?
2) what format does it save video files?
3) the filename of the saved files (if there is something in particular)
4) how does it index those files? along with the rest of audio, video & images or does it just recall the previous settings?
5) is there any way of modifying the location (from internal flash, as I figured it out) to memory card (either mmc1 or mmc2...)?


. 1) /home/user/.canola/youtube/videos
. 2) Flash Video (*.FLV)
. 3) the name sent along with the video from YouTube
. 4) it appears to index them when the rest of the media is indexed
. 5) as root, in the xterm shell:
. a) mkdir /media/mmc1/youtube (or /media/mmc2/youtube if you want them in your internal n800 SD slot)
. b) cd /home/user/.canola/youtube
. c) mv videos/* /media/mmc1/youtube
. d) rmdir videos
. e) ln -s /media/mmc1/youtube videos
. f) there is no step 'f'

[handful]

hei briand :) thanks for the answer to illiaden :) better than that? impossible!

Marcelo

[briand]

heh. :) np -- happy to help.

[Laughing Man]

Hmm, does anyone want to investigate this possibility. I haven't looked at how Canola stores the youtube videos (besides the directory). But if it's possible, could mYTube and Canola's Youtube share the same directory. Thus any videos that one downloads could be seen by the other program?

[handful]

Well, as I said this next release places the video on a "downloads" folder inside a disk that you choose. This download folder will hold podcast youtube and in the future pictures or other medias.

You can point mtube to it I think.

The path to a "configurable" folder is already in canola, you can also make a simlink to the mtube folder if you want with no problem.

br

Marcelo

[e-motion]

A little late to the parade, my Canola tablet :) hasn't seen much use since I started promoting my european tour, but just wanted to congratulate you again for the outstanding work : upgraded without a hitch.

[handful]

hi E-motion :) nice!!!! you know we suffered a lot in the beginning so it's quite nice to read that :)

[talmage]

(Hope I didn't miss this in all the previous posts.)

It would be nice if Canola and the built-in media player could share their collections of internet radio stations. If I select a link to a station's playlist file, the web browser offers to add it to my media library. I have to copy and paste to get Canola to know about it.

Btw, Canola doesn't recognize this as a valid pls but the built-in media player does: http://www.wpfw.org/assets/streaming/listen.pls

[handful]

Hi, if you install canola-tuning (is going to be default in next release) you add the support to your browser to either do like you do today, or to add to canola without copy paste :)

this is on the manual : http://openbossa.indt.org.br/canola/using.html#imedia

Thanks for the URL we will take a look in what's happening.

BR

Marcelo

[iliaden]

Hi,

Sorry for such a long delay... was busy.

Update1: disappearance of buttons on bottom:
- problem NOT related to CPU usage (had another process take 100% cpu, and was able to open with buttons)
- IF you switch windows (home key) when opening canola, buttons disappear (right after you launch the process, or before the main buttons become apparent on the screen, while the "loading" shows; if you switch after the key features become shown, the buttons on bottom do not disappear).
- was unable to get it further.

Update 2: "back" button problem
- problem

New bug: youtube plugin:
- when you make a search, scroll all the way down, beyond the videos; the thumbnails end at 1/2 of the scrollbar (bug#2), scroll back up and select a video to play, the entire plugin freezes.
i.e., if I return to home (pressing the "settings" key), I can navigate Canola, and everything works as usual; if I open youtube, it will directly switch to the frozen scroll where I cannot select any video, nor go back to the youtube "home"(all the options screen).


. a) mkdir /media/mmc1/youtube (or /media/mmc2/youtube if you want them in your internal n800 SD slot)
. b) cd /home/user/.canola/youtube
. c) mv videos/* /media/mmc1/youtube
. d) rmdir videos
. e) ln -s /media/mmc1/youtube videos

true; I was not precise enough with my question: is there a .conf file to edit to make the mmc1/2 the DEFAULT location to save videos?
edit: fixed the problem another way: bought a 16gb sd card, 3gb boot partition ;)
still, any way to do it?


canola-tuning (is going to be default in next release)

... I hope it will not run automatically; I do not dare to try it since Beta3: downloaded the "covers" (did not display over 90% of the downloaded), plus it took ALL the remaining memory (was down to <1mb!). I believe that the bug was fixed... I'll try it on the next release (on a external boot, just in case).

Also, I don't presume you would add the Canola-cleanup tool ;) ...just kidding!

I always use this tool (disregarding the codecs, as mentioned before) to install a newer version of Canola... in case some bugs were just in my upgrade.

Good luck

Ilia

P.S. When's the next release planned for?
P.P.S. did the media I sent you help? I got another album that doesn't want to be understood as only one - for the french fans only :)
Seriously - any progress on the album and/or album recognition process?

[handful]

Illia :

some comments :

1) we will try to follow your steps to find the button bugs, it seems that we did some fixed, hope they are already fixed, but if you managed to replicate them with consistency then it's quite easy to find / fix.

2) we improved the youtube plugin, but what you said (freezing) can be caused by several factors, we tested and we were not able to replicate. Youtube uses internet + mplayer thus it's a little bit harder to replicate everything but with your guide we will try in tomorrows test build.

3) There's not a conf file. You need to create a simlink as teached in the part you quoted. (as root in xterm or via ssh )
BUT: it's already implemented in Beta8

4) Canola-tuning is a plugin now, not a stand alone app, but it will not run by default, and the thing is : Downloading album art still illegal :) canola tuning features will be all integrated into canola but still be a third party plugin that needs to be installed. Also covers will take time to be downloaded, but it will be easier to do that to one specific cover or to the whole set

5) the "downloads" folder is actually for everything : youtube, podcast and covers.

6) as I told you then we verified (we can send you the source) but here goes again : WE DO NOT TOUCH "codecs" of any source. :) WE DO NOT TOUCH what we don't install, and if that happened to you, believe me it was not canola-cleanup tool fault ...

7) I already told you on the other post about that: we don't have a secure way to do it all, but we added to the multiple media your case, so it's improved. But we are not going to support "player" specific tags for that.

If everything goes right the release is on friday. If not can be on the first 2 days of next week.

Cheers,

Marcelo

[vvaz]

Another bug / missing feature:

You can scroll long title but it is not possible to do so with long album name.

[JELaVallee]

I'm going to take a look at the YouTube plug-in source, but also wanted to ask if there were existing development docs for setting up a dev environment specifically for Canola2 plug-in dev?

I've seen the list of tech on the main Canola2 site, but didn't see anything clearly describing tool setup.

Very interested in making a more interactive Picasa Album browser and also a Tivo/Vserver remote streaming client plugin.

Great work, Canola2 folks, I really think Canola as a platform for media service plugins is a brilliant idea. How about using it as an app launcher too? Smirk

thanks!,
Etienne

[iliaden]

Hi Marcelo,

Let's start with an update on the buttons bug:
- Not dependent on CPU load (as said last time)
- ALWAYS caused by task switching when loading Canola
- VERY OFTEN (one exception) occurs when loading Canola for the first time after reboot and/or media card change.
- NEVER occurs if Canola is restarted without reboot and/or media card change (by changing, I include unmounting /media/mmcX; mount /media/mmcX). during the second load, everything goes very smoothly... and it loads 10-20 times faster!


Youtube uses internet + mplayer thus it's a little bit harder to replicate everything but with your guide we will try in tomorrows test build.

I wish I could say more... this occurred once, and I was unable to replicate this. Will try tomorrow. If I get any info, I'll tell you ASAP.
Note: I updated MPlayer today, so if it's an MPlayer issue, it might have been fixed (although I doubt it since it was Canola's navigation that was frozen)


There's not a conf file. You need to create a simlink as teached in the part you quoted. (as root in xterm or via ssh )
BUT: it's already implemented in Beta8


That's great! I can wait a few days...


6) as I told you then we verified (we can send you the source) but here goes again : WE DO NOT TOUCH "codecs" of any source. :) WE DO NOT TOUCH what we don't install, and if that happened to you, believe me it was not canola-cleanup tool fault ...


Here, I must present you my greatest excuses. Analyzed the process step by step, and looked at Canola in RedPill mode: no codecs were touched; that was entirely my fault. HOWEVER: some of the python libs that Canola uses are also being used by other 3rd party media players. This must have been the interference, and the reason they stopped working. I did not check on the default media player, but was unable to launch youamp. Had to reinstall it (so it's dependencies were installed along with it).
You are right; canola-cleanup does delete everything that came with Canola. the problem is that it MIGHT be shared by other apps. in your next release (Beta9 or later), would it be possible for canola-cleanup to check if the python libraries are needed for apps other than Canola?
Although I would understand why it would be impossible: now that people can (and will) write plugins for Canola, it will be impossible to keep track.
Could you just think about this?


But we are not going to support "player" specific tags for that.

what do you mean by "player-specific tags" I always thought that there were only ID3 tags that existed for mp3 files (v1 & v2). how can they be player-specific?

Expecting the next release with anticipation and optimism

Ilia

[handful]

@Vvaz

You can scroll long title but it is not possible to do so with long album name.


Yeah, you can call missing feature, we decided not to add it (no to 2 lines scrolling at the same time)

Maybe touching on it could scroll it, but not automatic.

@jELaValle

Hi Etienne,

Indeed there is. We are finishing beta 8 so that why is not available, we are going to put it together with beta8.
The environment is quite simple :

A actual build for the desktop, with the configuration to work on the linux desktop.

Together with the build (a tar file) we are bundling 3 tutorials and a explanation on how to use.

The Picasa album is a really nice idea :) this and flickr were on our "wish list" for months and it would be easy with an api. like the youtube.

A plugin for app launcher could be done easily I think :) you can use anything in python so... :)

Cheers,

@iliaden

This is even better (button issues) but we closed beta 8 yesterday : / but I just took notice to do not forget about this issue at all.

Of course the load is faster :) the media is already scanned, if you remove / unmount media is discarded and a full scan is needed :)

About the youtube : actually it can be the mplayer, not that it would lock Canola UI, but an error in the communication between atabake and Mplayer can cause that : / But I would say it probable a bug on Canola :)

Another good news : Morpheuz was able to find out the bug on the shuffle complained but some people. :)

Yeah, the lib thing can happen, and we only do that (to our dependencies that for sure can be of other) because we want to make sure things are "clean" for your other applications, and clean a dependencies problems (like the alternative repository mixing etc)

We cannot look at it for a simple reason : if your other application installed the lib that is in wrong version and not on maemo extras, then we need to remove to be able to install Canola.

The cleanup was made for those who "want" to use canola and for some reason ( wrong repos, failed install) need to make sure things are clean down there. So if your plan is to use clean-up to remove Canola, then I would say use the simple install.

If it a basic uninstall / reinstall, there will be no problem with the cleanup.

So in the end, do you understand why Canola-Cleanup exists? ITS only to those who have repository mess. If you use only official maemo repositories / trusted ones.. you don need the clean up :) just use the application manager ok? That the way we solve the problem, the right way. The cleanup is a "safety" tool to clear the device of a user who is pissed off :)

Yes, there's a standard, and we do support it the best way possible but in some cases, iTunes and other playes has this "custom" tag for compilations, that makes the life easier for them, but not for us.

I think people will like the new beta, and developers tool are getting nicer :)

Also, if not on beta8, beta9 will bring a MUCH better list / scrolling interaction. Lot of experiment with Adriano yesterday and today and we are quite optimistic about that :)

Cheers!

(thanks for the detailed feedback as always)

Marcelo

[jabastien]

Marcelo,

Since the beginning I always felt that the YouTube plug-in did not return all result from a search. Since the source is available I look into it, and I confirmed my assumption. I wonder if the Team wanted the plug-in to behave that way for some odd reasons.

Is it possible to change the behavior or the search in the next release with the following code in "client.py" at line 63.

from:

def search(self, query):
"""Search for video by keywords."""
return self._request("%s?vq=%s",
self.url_video_search, quote(query))


to:


def search(self, query):
"""Search for video by keywords."""
return self._request("%s?vq=%s&max-results=50&racy=include",
self.url_video_search, quote(query))


Thanks You,
Jacques

[handful]

Hi jabastien, yeah, for this version we placed only a limited numbers, because we were deciding how to allow "paging" between a bigger set of results.

I think in the beta9 time frame (or actually sooner because it's independent) we will add this feature there.

Br

Marcelo

[jabastien]

Marcelo, Can I pach it myself? If yes, It looks like the youtube plugin is in a compiled state. What do I need to compile it?

Thanks for another great version,
Jacques

[handful]

Jabastien : I will upload in a couple of minutes (actually a little bit more) the tar.gz for plugin development so you will be able not only to compile your version but to test it clearly on your desktop before trying it out :)

BR

Marcelo

[jabastien]

Marcelo,

Is this plugin development OS independent? If not, what Linux distro do you recommend?

-
Jacques

[iliaden]

Hi Marcelo,

I'm about to install Beta8. (the Canola-cleanup) tool is already running :P.

Do you mind starting another post as this one with clear installation order, as well as space for me to leave feedback (starting tonight)

Thank you

Ilia

[handful]

I don't mind.. it's just that we are finishing upload the site :)

Marcelo

[genjosanzo]

Hi all, first of all i'm thinking canola is getting every they more amazing....in my opinion is already the killer app of maemo world and the add of the plugin of lastfm just confirm my theory!
Have you ever thought to integrate the bookmark system of youtube plugin with the youtube account? In this way it would be possible to bookmark video from the n8x0 and then wacth them from any other device(i'm thinking to a laptop of a friend that is following your favourit or to the social networking more in general) I think it would be not so difficult since the youtube api are used in many python project.
What do you think about this proposal?

[handful]

Genjosanzo : yes we did, we just don't have time : / we are trying to come up with solutions for that, and we are actually accepting suggestion / patches from developers (code is open, testing is ready and so on ) but time is a constraint.

We don't use the main youtube api but the support is indeed easy to implement. It just needs time.

So I think is cool and useful, but we don't have time to do it :)

Focus now is to try to make it as best as possible (so actualy we are trying to see how to improve mplayer) and fix small bugs.

Marcelo

[jalladin]

4291


hello,

I just reflashed my n810 a few days ago to see if it would help battery life and functional use of media apps. canola was one that made it lag before my reflash... well skippin to now after the reflash it seems to be fine but canola is giving me problems, not with the speed but just the ( youtube plugin ) it wint play any videos that i try to view. it also wont allow me to input podcast feeds... if someone wouldnt mind sharing thier experience with canola to help, i would be ever so greatful.

[jalladin]

4292

4293


these are just more screen shoots to give better insight on what my issue is with my podcast.the first screen shot is of me trying to download from the feed ( which this message pops up and it wont let me download. the second is me trying to play the only episode that was downloaded previously, but it wont play...:mad:

[hordeman]

Search is your friend... or more simply... looking at the thread right about yours. :) A new version has been released that isn't completely working.

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=32369&page=3