[Canola] Canola2 beta8 Released : Release Notes

[handful]

Beware! If you have extra themes installed, make sure to update them too.

Hi Everyone, so one more milestone was reached, and the packages are already on the repositories. Please point your applications manager to the update section and put it to test!

News for developers, Today we will also upload the file with the binary build of Canola for the desktop linux to be used as testing environment. It plays everything, and will work flawlessly on at least Ubuntu Linux. To guarantee a fully working testing place, you can also use an Ubuntu Live CD in VMware. (this is also the way for Mac and Windows Users)

If you are a theme maker, you can also download the example style sheet, and compile the theme in the testing environment for your personal test. As themes requires a probably complicated (for you theme maker) debian package creation, we are setting up a webserver to do that for you.

Youtube is updated, and uploaded to the Addons sections make sure you also update this plugin.

Last.fm is available today, so please check the Add ons, section!
Warning : As most probably known, theres not a full proof way to protect the Last.fm password, so you are warned that we are not encrypting/obfuscating your password (just like a lot of maemo applications do) and it's clear that you agree with that if you download and instal the Last.fm plugin. Our policy for that is being open, so Last.fm source is also going to be available on the website.

We need testers for : Experimental Kinetic List : As commented several times by myself (handful) on the ITT forum, we were always searching for ways of improving the list and making it better with less accidental clicks. So we did some changes to an experimental list implementation and we want to provide for those with list problems, and also for some with no list problems, because it's a very sensitive component in Canola UI. So if you know how to become root and place a couple of .pyo files on some folder please drop me a line at handful AT gmail.

Finally, apart from the changelog bellow a lot of bugs were fixed, even some nasty ones like the Mplayer taking over the keys on the video playing screen and we are really waiting for more feedback.

Better third-party plugin support: More API available for third-party plugin development.
Better handling of large titles in titlebar.
Fix during cover change.
Sort files inside "Browse by Folder".
Show current time during seek.
Fixed bugs in video player.
Ability to refresh podcast feeds manually.
Ability to select where downloaded contents go.
Smooter animation in the lists and sub menus.
General theme improvements.
Allow more podcast feeds.
Support compressed feeds and request them by default.
Better handle out of space.
Show more normalized download velocity and time remaining.
Various fixes in network handling in Podcast.
Restart downloads when podcast plugin is loaded.
Make it possible to preview the podcast description in the list.
Make it possible to read the feed description while listening to the podcast episode.
Remove episodes from "Podcast: New Episodes" when listened to or deleted.
Show the podcast feed title in the player as album and not the parent title.
Ogg support for the Scanner is back.


Unfortunately Out of beta8, but on advanced stage:

Playlist creation (on-the-move) + Playlist saving and other related features
Youtube paging capabilities for the search results (to allow more results to be browsed)
UPNP support
PNG thumbnail support still missing
Full hardware key mapping support

Known Issues in this Release

Don't set the download folder to a non-existant disk. It will not work, it will spin forever on Internet Radio and Photocast
Icon for last.fm on Red Theme is missing (using basic one)
Podcast "new ball" is coming back when you delete a already listened podcast.
Last.fm will scrobbling 2 times if you listen to more than 50% and then rewind the music.

Before asking question please take a look in the "using canola guide"
For more info, please visit the Internet Tablet Talk Canola Forum

[iliaden]

Hi Marcelo.

First feedback on beta8:
My installation procedure & feedback:

1. installed canola beta8
2. added all the video, audio & photo folders
3. went to "multiple album entries
it said "scanning, and within 1 sec, Canola died (completely; as if by forcekill)
4. I restarted; everything worked perfectly, and I combined a multiple album.
5. tried to login to last.fm. It said that my system time was not ... There was not enough space available to write the entire error message (to be fixed)
I presume that the error was that a long time ago, I set my homecity to London, yet the time was Montreal's (5hr difference). Afterwards, I set up a calendar, and if I change my locale, the calendar would switch accordingly. this has nothing to do with Canola, yet the last.fm plugin won't let me login.
after this, I changed my locale, spent about an hour retyping my calendar, and went back to canola testing. This did solve the problem with last.fm

Quick note on this problem: I did not have ANY problems with logging in from Vagalume. first time that it requires me to change the system time.

I tried to reproduce the button disappearance... without any success. Congratulations!
About this: the lack of the "menu" button in the bottom right corner in last.fm is normal or a bug? Oh, and is there a way to say "love" or "ban" in last.fm? i'd expect it to be in the lower right menu... also, do you have the option to save to disk from last.fm? menu needed!
Another note about last.fm: for the "next" button, I need to double-click on the button. Not a real problem, just need to keep this in mind.
Also, you say that

Last.fm will scrobbling 2 times if you listen to more than 50% and then rewind the music.

I cannot neither rewind, not got back in last.fm
Edit: last.fm does not automatically go to the next track. it freezes at -00:01, and I have to click for the next track manually.

Back to the youtube "freeze" i mentioned about previously:
When I had last.fm playing, I opened the youtube plugin and was quite impressed that the music did not stop. I clicked on a search, selected one video, and before it started loading, clicked back (wrong selection). The result of this action was a "frozen" youtube: I CAN scroll; i cannot play any of the videos. When I click on any video, it becomes highlighted, yet does not open. When clicked on the back button (both screen & hardware), nothing happens. when clicked on the middle hardware button on n800 (how's it called?), it brings me back to the "home" menu of Canola. If I select youtube again, instead of the menu, my search's results open right away, with the problem just described. I'll check tomorrow from the command line to see if I can give more info on this.

Also, it's a great addition the "browse by folder" section for local music. specially for someone whose audio isn't properly tagged (like mine)


Another note that I cannot classify as a bug: power consumption. when I open canola, for a second, I get the message that my n800 is charging (although it said that the battery was full 5 min ago, and I did not unplug it). half a second after, it says that the battery is full [again]. is this due to an increase in CPU power (Canola was launched from complete rest), or is it something else?

More updates in a few days (will be out of town this weekend, without internet, I think)

Ilia

[handful]

Hi illiaden, I already forwarded you bugs to the person who's responsible for the code in Last.fm and Youtube. He will try to fix the issues, and as they are separated plugins maybe they are released before beta9.

Sorry for the last.fm thing. It's our first release, and for sure we will not be nearly as good as vagalume. Only feedback + bug fixing + features will make us improve to be as nice as them :) BUT :
The ban / love buttons are there. Just click where you usually would click the stars. :) (black theme has a problem - no icons were in the package - we will fix )
REWING or go BACK: yes, you should not be able to do that. It was a wrong word to use. Actually to drag the bar in any song (on your library not on last.fm) than the scrobbling goes again.

:)



youtube : do you still have mplayer installed? Please try the terminal way and go straigh to this video freezing problem. We need to know what's happening :)

About the power consumption thing : I don't know.. we don't have those messages here. Do you have any kind of device monitoring app ? applet? We will investigate it further and if you can tell us some apps you have installed so we can try mimic it here.

So you are also "plugged on power right" ? I don't know maybe canola is checking the battery and the signal is broadcasting to the system messaging thing. Let us investigate that deeper.

Cheers and thanks!

Marcelo

[brontide]

The start of all youtube videos are slightly corrupted. Playback of the saved .flv's directly through mplayer does not show these same artifacts.

I still think the interface lags a little more than it should, but that's a subjective item ( flat black theme ).

[brontide]

Hardware back/return button does not work as expected on the now playing screen ( youtube, haven't checked others )

[iliaden]

Hi,
First, thanks for mentioning about the flatblack theme problem in last.fm. It's the only theme I use (might try flatred to check).

Next, youtube update: I was able to run it normally after restarting Canola (without clicking back right away, it seem to work).
new "problem" found however: the video playback is unequal: the first 3/4 of a second, only 1/4 of the video is played, then in the last 1/4 second, all the remaining frames are displayed. (this is continuously repeated). That problem creates a unequal video playback, quite uneasy for the viewer. The playback was better on the previous release; the total framerate might have been smaller, yet more equal.
Wondering if you could take a look,


About MPlayer: I have version 1.0rc1-maemo.26.n8x0 (if there's a newer version, it's not in any of the repositories I have)
Ilia

P.S. please don't get me wrong: i believe there IS a serious progress from beta7 to beta8, and I appreciate it! I am just helping you find the bugs.

P.P.S. is a menu supposed to be present for the last.fm or not yet?

[handful]

Brontide : The Ui does lag in several cases. We do push it to the limits even more on those really complex screens (like the youtube list, podcast list) where there's too much objects on a scene : / We try to improve as much as we can :) This inital part, I think is due to the Streaming mode + embedded mode. If we can make it work better ( a patch for mplayer) we will do that.

Hardware back button : I will check this, it didn't happen here in my test devices.

thanks for the feedback.

Marcelo

[handful]

Last.fm menu : No, all basic features are in the screen right now.

Video playback : Ilia, we didn't changed anything (Really) on the video playback. We just say "mplayer please play this, embedded mode, thanks" :)

The codec mess on the first second already happened on beta7 (streaming) and it's actually some videos happens others not. We really didn't touch this. :/

I think you can see also that this doesn't happen if you play from canola, but inside the video section ( a saved video )

Cheers

Marcelo

[iliaden]

Hi,

I copy the problem with the hardware "back" button problem: only the onscreen button works when video is being played in youtube (both fullscreen and windowed)
This also occurs when playing video from a local folder.
Does not occur when playing music from local or last.fm. Does not occur in the photos.

Ilia

[handful]

yeah, it's a localized problem. We are already fixing it. We don't use hardware keys :) (kidding)

[iliaden]

Hi again,

video playabck again:
I selected one of the videos that I uploaded myself to try:
lagging in the manner I described before all along the video.
problem does not solve when played from local.

Just compared with youtube in the default web browser: smoother video, awful framerate (it is continuous, yet always at a bad quality).

Could the problem be that you don't say "thanks" to MPlayer loud enough? ;)

or could it be that I updated MPlayer 4-5 days ago?

Ilia

[handful]

Ilia : we really don't play it : ) it will always play worse than on mplayer, but this can be a "version" related thing. I'm testing with .26 and it's working nicely.

On my other device with .24 is really choppy :/

(send me your video url ? )

[iliaden]

hi,

Last update for today (11:30pm here, I'm way too tired!)

did not find any quick way to solve the video playback problem. Tried playing the default n8x0 video in canola: the lag described before does NOT occur. the video did lag 3-4 times during playback, but I consider this OK, since I know how much resources canola eats.
tried on a completely random video: no lag. Will focus on when/where the problem occurs tomorrow.

update on the hardware "back" button bug: still hdw button still does not work when the video isn't playing.

Good night everyone

Ilia

[iliaden]

video URL :www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXMP4mPVPAM (in russian, sorry)

or a search for : iliaden romeo julieta will give it to you.

good luck

another video i found choppy/laggy :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmwqpHsMExg (english this time)

both of them are bad when run from internet & local.

[handful]

Hi,

The problem is really with Mplayer. I have a version here with this problem and 2 with perfect playback. Is your video on the "correct" size / aspect ( or still stretched? )

When the video is playing on fullscreen, canola almost go to sleep, to leave mplayer alone doing it's work.. .so this is no excuse, but the fact that mplayer takes the playback and has a slightly worse performance (or not so slightly) in embedded mode.

As I have been saying, the only solution for us to really solve this problem is to work on a player engine for us : / I wish we had time : /

[handful]

Update: just tried your video, worked perfect on the .26 version device.
It seems that the stretch fix may have influenced the playback ? I will forward this to Arthur (morpheuz)

also played more with your name, all worked perfectly. So we do have a mplayer version problem : can you confirm for me your version ?

Marcelo

[handful]

Please everyone with Video problems check :
(xterm)

type:

dpkg -l | grep atabake
dpkg -l | grep mplayer

And tell us the version!

It seems that Atabake 1.3 and mplayer .24 is the worst combination. All devices here with 1.4 +.36 work flawlessly.

We are working on this to see what we can do about it :/ And now we were able to reproduce micro's bug (dbus machine UID thing )

damn it : /

[TTgowings]

As of right now anyways (I say that because with the way my luck goes, about the time I think something is great and works, it quickly dies on me or quits working) I'm exstatic with this release.

My Videocasts finally work ! One thing though for whatever reason if I try to add the url in the settings menu they don't work, comes back as no url available, but if I go to the url and add it via the RSS feed icon within the browser low and behold they work.

Thanks again Handful and the entire Canola team.

Oh, and btw you guys at INDT are friggin nuts, this has got to be about the 3rd time or so that you've released an update on a Friday, do you ppl ever go home ??
(makes robot noises in the background)

[handful]

Finally a positive feedback :) hehehe (kidding, I was just wondering if everyone is going to face the problems)

TT : I think we are just a little bit nuts :) You know, the city is hot, theres a nice Air conditioner in the office, we like to hang around :)

Br

Marcelo

[chrisak]

I'm still unable to paste urls into the new podcast, radio, photocast fields. I don't think I've gotten any replies re this before, but still wondering if others have same issue?

Also had same sys time issue as first comment with lastfm, but not sure I'm undeerstanding the cause/solution?

[phutterman]

It seems to me that whichever SD card I have selected (internal or external), it always saves podcasts to the external card...

EDIT - Nevermind, it just requires a restart of Canola and then it puts it in the selected location.
Sorry, false alarm.


Anyway, thanks for the great software and the consistent updates! It's always really exciting when there's a Canola update. It's like Christmas all over again!

[JoeF]

No bookmark or resume feature appears to be in the works. I can't believe I'm the only person who wants to listen to audiobooks on the N800. I always thought it was a rather common activity.

[handful]

Chrisak :

Paste URLs are you pasting the correct link (the .xml or .rss or .pls ) with full address?
Or you cannot even do the "paste" comand? The control+v on the keybord (n810) will not work. try closing the keyboard and doing with the on screen keyboard (theres a menu there then... paste)

Even with that: install Canola tuning. This will add the feed handler to your browser so you don need to control +C control +V on canola. Just add in right category.

Abou the Last.fm issue :
Does your password have NUMBERS or Signals on it? if so :

a, there's a bug on the input framework (outside of canola) that it seems to only work on GTK applications( work correctly). Inside Canola (non-gtk) application, the FN keys (the one you hold to type numbers, or that you touch twice to keep typing numbers / blue color symbols, doesn't work.. thus if you try entering numbers on your password it will probably fail.

b. Solution : use the onscreen keyboard or make sure you are entering numbers for sure with the FN key pressed the right way.


BR

[handful]

@Joe : that point is not "you" on in the works. If you take a look at the forums, we still facing some basic playback challengers, and the priorities are set for the most requested features. Sorry but bookmark still on the list, but is not really a priority. The save position for podcast is a kind of simple bookmark and it's working but a full bookmark system, maybe will be left for a third party plugin : /

I really cannot commit the team for that now : / sorry

Marcelo

[adammelancon]

I can not even start canola after the update. I have uninstalled everything canola related and run the cleanup script. Even rebooted before and after the script and it still wont start. It just says “starting canola” then nothing happens.

[handful]

adam : please, if you can, always provide more information so we are able to help you :

first thing to do is : run canola via Xterm with the -vvv option :

canola -vvvv

This will give us a hint on what happened, and we will be able to help you.

As far as the development goes, what we know today is that there's some alternative repositories out there for alpha-level applications that have dependencies needed by canola in totally different versions... this will let canola install but it will break it.

But this may not be your problem, so please send us the log!

Cheers

Marcelo

[adammelancon]

thanks! I forgot about the vvvv, i just tried v at first.

~ $ canola -vvvv
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/canola", line 225, in <module>
mger = Manager(options.config_file)
File "python-terra/core/singleton.py", line 26, in __call__
File "python-terra/core/manager.py", line 43, in __init__
File "python-terra/core/manager.py", line 54, in _setup_plugin_manager
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/shutil.py", line 91, in copy2
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/shutil.py", line 46, in copyfile
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/usr/share/canola/plugins/plugins.pickle'
~ $

[chrisak]

Handful, thanks for the reply... I'm using an n800, it's the paste command itself that doesn't work. I'm using onscreen keyboard/menu. I've tested quite a bit... I'll copy an url but it won't paste into canola. But if I switch right over tto something like notes, the paste wwill work. And I have no problems in any other app... so clipboard seeems ok. Of
course if I'm the only one witth the prolblem then I guess it must be my sys :) This problem existed with .07 and .06 but at some point over the last year it did work :)

edit... i've deciided to pass on the tuning app this time.

The lastfm thing is something odd.... i'm rying to sort iit out now reading past threads. Its all related to timezone. If I set clock/homee city to chicago then lastfm works. But then i'm houurs off. if i change back to correct time, lastfm won't logon :/

[TTgowings]

chrisak, try using not the small osk but the finger one the larger one that opens with the Dpad press, try that if that still doesn't do the trick then open the url via the web browser then after a few secs that the page is loading up the RSS feed your orange RSS icon (the one in the browser) should show up then click that and a few secs later it should give you the add this feed via Canola.

[adammelancon]

/usr/share/canola/plugins # ls -la
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Apr 4 23:02 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 0 Apr 4 23:00 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 744324 Apr 4 17:21 canola-core.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 66574 Apr 4 17:22 canola-tube.zip
/usr/share/canola/plugins #


/home/user/.canola # ls -la
drwx------ 2 user users 0 Apr 4 23:05 .
drwxr-x--- 33 user users 0 Apr 4 23:15 ..
/home/user/.canola #

[hircus]

Abou the Last.fm issue :
Does your password have NUMBERS or Signals on it? if so :

a, there's a bug on the input framework (outside of canola) that it seems to only work on GTK applications( work correctly). Inside Canola (non-gtk) application, the FN keys (the one you hold to type numbers, or that you touch twice to keep typing numbers / blue color symbols, doesn't work.. thus if you try entering numbers on your password it will probably fail.

b. Solution : use the onscreen keyboard or make sure you are entering numbers for sure with the FN key pressed the right way.


BR

To slightly rephrase, the problem is that while with GTK applications, pressing the FN key would lock it in FN mode until the next key is pressed, in non-GTK application the locking does not happen, so you have to keep the FN key depressed (just like you would on a normal laptop keyboard)

[chrisak]

@TTgowings

Thank you! That did the trick. And also led to an interesting discovery. In the keyboard options menu there are 2 checkboxes: 1 to launch fingerboard with fingerpress, and 1 to launch it with middle dpad button. I decided some time ago to only check the dpad option. When selecting a canola text field, as with any other app, I get the small keyboard with which I can type, but in canola the pasting didn't work.

For some reason the dpad button doesn't = fingerboard in canola like it will everywhere else... but when I went into the keyboard settings and checked the first box, then now when I click on a canola text area I immediately get large keyboardd with working paste feature. Yay!!

I remember now the early days of canola when pasting worked for me... it was with fullscreen keybboard then too.

Anyway, thanks :)

[vvaz]

N800, OS2007, mplayer 26

1. Had problems with start. It hang indefinitely. Started after removing ~/.canola ~/.atabake (also start takes much longer than with beta7
2. mplayer26 - youtube videos still stretched, I understood from other comments it should be fixed?
3. compilation albums... argh, didn't agree with some decisions of previous version(s) - you lost performer data - but it worked! Now it doesn't recognised two albums which previously worked perfectly
4. Not Canola (don't know exact relationship) but cover downloader failed miserably comparing to beta7. Only half of covers were downloaded. I know this is separate project but I suspect this is somewhat related to 3. and feeding of metadata.
5. Less responsiveness of interface. In beta7 I could drag volume slider without problems now there is considerable lag. Note: when I just click in some point it works immediately, just dragging with finger is much slower
6. Animations are less fluent comparing with beta7 (eg. covers, settings tabs).
7. In Album covers list is bug: if album doesn't have performer tag, artists name stays from previous album. This way I have Reise, Reise by Katie Melua (of Piece by Piece) :)
8. Youtube plugin: when I open settings tab (eg to save video) while still playing; audio and video stops but after closing tab it just rewinds 10-20 sec forward as it was playing non-stop.

[fpp]

Beta 8 seems to be uncompatible with Python-launcher :

If Canola doesn't start after upgrade, this may be one possible cause...

EDIT : on one tablet (N800), removing python-launcher was enough to get beta8 up and running.
On another (N810) beta8 still fails with the same message adammelancon reported :
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/usr/share/canola/plugins/plugins.pickle'

(both use OS2008 and ran beta7 just fine).

[vvaz]

And during next start up Canola also hanged completely. Something bad with reading of config files?

But third start (without removal of config files) was successful.

Problem with detection of network vanished. Thanks.

[adammelancon]

I had Python-launcher installed, but removed it when i installed b8 and rebooted several times. I still can't launch canola b8 on my N800/os2008.

[MikeL]

Installed beta8 this morning prior to travel between Liverpool/Madrid.
(Time to test on plane, after quick test with internet connection)

Everything fine for me with update from beta 7 to beta 8 on N810 with latest version of OS2008, mplayer v26 etc.

Last fm works very very well ;-)

The sensible change in beta7 original location for saved YouTube videos means that previously saved videos are now NOT readily accessible (Those held on core internal memory) which is a little frustrating. Canola still knows about previous downloads (Thumbnails available) of saved items but now cannot access "giving invalid URL message" etc.

I am not worried about this issue but it does appear that perhaps users will need to clean up after Canola beta7 manually?

Overall Canola2 is rock solid, I spent ages switching options, going between music photos and videos and not once did Canola hiccup :-)

The YouTube video playback is still suspect with many videos having the video/audio sync issue. (Hope Canola/mplayer team continue to work together and manage to resolve this issue soon)

Like the way titles of songs will re-scroll when text is selected during playback. The Favorite Played tracks, I had not noticed before but they are only added to this list, if Five stars are selected. (Four stars or lower they do not show in list)

Great work Canola team, I am actually pleased you have delayed the UPnP release, as I can tell that you don't release anything for Canola2 unless its up to your high standards and you guys are really happy with it!

[makel]

I had Python-launcher installed, but removed it when i installed b8 and rebooted several times. I still can't launch canola b8 on my N800/os2008.

Same problem here. N810.

[handful]

Vvaz :

1. Had problems with start. It hang indefinitely. Started after removing ~/.canola ~/.atabake (also start takes much longer than with beta7
- You had probably some problems with some files, that canola was trying to recover. With the full plugin support now it seems that some python applications are conflicting with canola ; / We will investigate this. There should be no added time to startup what so ever if things goes right.


2. mplayer26 - youtube videos still stretched, I understood from other comments it should be fixed?

- It doesn depend more on us. We did the patch, but the MPLAYER project must release a new version with this patch applied, .26 is not that version.

3. compilation albums... argh, didn't agree with some decisions of previous version(s) - you lost performer data - but it worked! Now it doesn't recognised two albums which previously worked perfectly

- Again the same way to solve: can you send 3 or 4 files of each album? so we can study also this case?

4. Not Canola (don't know exact relationship) but cover downloader failed miserably comparing to beta7. Only half of covers were downloaded. I know this is separate project but I suspect this is somewhat related to 3. and feeding of metadata.

- Well, the scanning / metadata didn change much (almost nothing). What must have happen was a failure in Amazon - last.fm service. CAn you try again in another connection and tell me if the problem persists? If the music is tagged (Showing in the menu correctly) the cover download just pics that and make the query

5. Less responsiveness of interface. In beta7 I could drag volume slider without problems now there is considerable lag. Note: when I just click in some point it works immediately, just dragging with finger is much slower

- Volume was like that. There a slightly delay : yes, since beta1. (actually was worse in beta1), we were looking into ways of improving this, but as it deals with some independent (system) components volumes the delay is giving us the creeps now :/ We still after this.

6. Animations are less fluent comparing with beta7 (eg. covers, settings tabs).

- I really don know, but probably you have a. something wrong on the system, consuming cpu and then canola is slower, or 2 you are comparing a flat theme with a regular theme. I'm directly responsible for the interaction design, and I can assure you if things slow down a little bit, I shout really loud :)

7. In Album covers list is bug: if album doesn't have performer tag, artists name stays from previous album. This way I have Reise, Reise by Katie Melua (of Piece by Piece)

- nice, thanks for the bug report.

8. Youtube plugin: when I open settings tab (eg to save video) while still playing; audio and video stops but after closing tab it just rewinds 10-20 sec forward as it was playing non-stop.

- Mplayer x FLV file format seeking problems. There are also smaller issues, that SUCK, but they are really more complicated (format x codec) things that canola doesn go into. Like I said before, if we wanted to solve this : We would have to make our own player, proprietary, buy codecs, and charge people more than 20 dollars just to pay codec licensing, and still we would not be able to play formats people demand :/ complicated hun?

[iliaden]

Hi,

first, about the video :
dpkg -l | grep atabake : 0.1.4
dpkg -l | grep mplayer : 26 (not 36 as you said works flawlesly)

video runs fullscreen, instead of 3:4 ratio; I presume it stretched...

found the "hidden" buttons on the flatblack theme for last.fm :D ... change the color to gray/white instead of black/white?

@ vvaz:

2. mplayer26 - youtube videos still stretched, I understood from other comments it should be fixed?

no - 36 should be fixed; I also have streched & laggy video on my n800, MPlayer 26 (OS2008)

5. Less responsiveness of interface. In beta7 I could drag volume slider without problems now there is considerable lag. Note: when I just click in some point it works immediately, just dragging with finger is much slower
[QUOTE]
on my device, the video response of the drag takes 1/2 second extra, yet the volume changes immediately. Would not consider this as a real problem.

[QUOTE]
7. In Album covers list is bug: if album doesn't have performer tag, artists name stays from previous album. This way I have Reise, Reise by Katie Melua (of Piece by Piece)

have nothing like this. all the artist's names are OK. However, if an album has SOME artist tags and other files have the same album name, but NO artist tracks, then all the tracks with an artist are considered as an album, and the rest, each as a separate album (with the same name).
I'll post the link to this album once I upload it.

however, the last.fm was a great improvement to canola - now I can have one less media player installed :D

Also, Chrisak reported the same problem as me for Last.fm:

The last.fm thing is something odd.... i'm trying to sort iit out now reading past threads. Its all related to timezone. If I set clock/homee city to chicago then lastfm works. But then i'm hours off. if i change back to correct time, lastfm won't login

This problem will occur to all those who did not change the timezone after recieving the device and do not live at GMT 0.

I just realized how much work you must have right now fixing all this. I'll try to slow down my problem discoveries... ;)

Ilia

P.S. where could I get MPlayer36?

[handful]

@Makel : Canola-Cleanup for a clean unninstall, make sure you don't have ANY devel / non-safe repositories enabled, reboot (just to make sure) and install beta8 clean.

This will make sure everything is clean again.

@Adaam : same for you. You probably have more than just python launcher causing conflicts, can you send again the -vvv output? any message is helpful so we can find what happens, if the problem is on canola or a conflict or someone placing packges that shouldn't...

Marcelo

[handful]

Hi,

first, about the video :
dpkg -l | grep atabake : 0.1.4
dpkg -l | grep mplayer : 26 (not 36 as you said works flawlesly)

(mine is .26 also)

video runs fullscreen, instead of 3:4 ratio; I presume it stretched...

(yes, we talked about that several post :) remember? It an mplayer problem, we fixed but it not on .26 version, we are also waiting for the release.

found the "hidden" buttons on the flatblack theme for last.fm ... change the color to gray/white instead of black/white?

"so you use less bright and they became more invisible? we will improve the vibisility then. it is grey - white, because the background is BLACK. :) but I think it too grey in low brightness settings.



on my device, the video response of the drag takes 1/2 second extra, yet the volume changes immediately. Would not consider this as a real problem.

- Yeah, this is actually something to have how the EDJE widget receives the signals of drag etc. Maybe it will be improved, but we are really not worring too much for now.



I'll post the link to this album once I upload it.

- Thanks!


however, the last.fm was a great improvement to canola - now I can have one less media player installed

- Nice :)

I just realized how much work you must have right now fixing all this. I'll try to slow down my problem discoveries...

- Please dont : ) we will fix it. It just that we followed last.fm protocol rules, then those thign happens. :)


Ilia

P.S. where could I get MPlayer36?
sOrry it was .26 !

Marcelo

[adammelancon]

I tried an uninstall/reinstall one
more time, and this time it worked! b8 is now up and running.

[etrunko]

/usr/share/canola/plugins # ls -la
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Apr 4 23:02 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 0 Apr 4 23:00 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 744324 Apr 4 17:21 canola-core.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 66574 Apr 4 17:22 canola-tube.zip
/usr/share/canola/plugins #


/home/user/.canola # ls -la
drwx------ 2 user users 0 Apr 4 23:05 .
drwxr-x--- 33 user users 0 Apr 4 23:15 ..
/home/user/.canola #

Hey Adam, please try running the following command in xterm as root

# bin/cnl-rescan-collections

It seems the canola plugin database is missing and it was not updated in the installation process. Please inform if it works or not.

Also, could you check if there is enough free space in your device?

Best regards, Etrunko.

[etrunko]

I tried an uninstall/reinstall one
more time, and this time it worked! b8 is now up and running.

Good to know!! :)

[tarkam]

Thanks guys, so far so good. I know you allready went over this but the UI does seem a little bit slower from B7 (i'm using flatback black). Not running anything else and running after the IT has just been rebooted.

Youtube worked good for me. And everything else worked smoothly. Haven't tried Last FM but will try as soon as possible.

Thanks for the update!
d}

[handful]

Hi Tarkam,

This is weird, because we do take this quite seriously, of never slowing down.. actually it always need to speed up a bit. Can you double check if metacrawler process is running ? (or other deamons that may consume a little bit more memory in the beginning of the usage) ?

Anyways, we are always hearing complains and if we can notice / reproduce the issue we will do our best to improve it.

Thanks for the nice words,

Marcelo

[vvaz]

Vvaz :
1. Had problems with start. It hang indefinitely. Started after removing ~/.canola ~/.atabake (also start takes much longer than with beta7
- You had probably some problems with some files, that canola was trying to recover. With the full plugin support now it seems that some python applications are conflicting with canola ; / We will investigate this. There should be no added time to startup what so ever if things goes right.

All these problems vanished after uninstall-cleanup-install. Well, not all start is still slower than b7


3. compilation albums... argh, didn't agree with some decisions of previous version(s) - you lost performer data - but it worked!
- Again the same way to solve: can you send 3 or 4 files of each album? so we can study also this case?

How?

- Well, the scanning / metadata didn change much (almost nothing). What must have happen was a failure in Amazon - last.fm service. CAn you try again in another connection and tell me if the problem persists? If the music is tagged (Showing in the menu correctly) the cover download just pics that and make the query

I tried several times and nothing new.

[MikeL]

An example Youtube video which is incorrectly stretched to fill screen and the sound is out of sync when using Canola beta 8
(I believe Video/Sound was IN sync with Canola2 beta 7?)

Searching Youtube for "apologise" where the following is currently third available video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGPUuPHdHQg

If above is played in Canola2 beta 8 we have video/audio sync issue and stretched Video. Playing the same canola2 downloaded and saved *.flv in mplayer v26 directly does not exhibit either problem. (Canola2 beta8, atabake 0.1.4 and mplayer .26 installed on N810)

Hope information is helpful

[dan]

Handful,
Very nice update. The podcast and youtube are great additions. The lips sync here is better than in MyTube. Although I can't get player to recognize the MyTube videos.
I do like that now I can scroll without it being so sensitive that it jumps to a video. I also for the first got the finger keyboard to come up. It only took eight months and your update! Hehehehe!!! Dan

I would like to see audiobooks. I just listened for the first time to Dracula. Very entertaining.

What I'm seeing is that Canola is evolving into a complete media center. Why not add features to enable playback of recorded or live TV, Satellite, Cable etc... ?

Keep up the great work! Dan

[hfw01]

I've had an issue pop up with beta 8 that I had seen before, but it went away.

When I am at the "now playing" screen, and attempt to lock my screen Canola registers the click on the N800 and pauses the podcast. Previously when I noticed this I was hitting the button to lock the screen prior to the popup menu showing. When I would wait for the menu to popup I had no issues. Now it doesn't matter if the menu has popped up or not. I have started pausing my podcast, then locking the screen, so that the podcast starts playing again when the screen locks.

-hal

[GeraldKo]

Hi, handful! Two problems.

1. I've mentioned this one before, and it remains the same: if I have played a movie for a while, pausing it does not fully pause it, it just keeps stuttering forward. I didn't install Beta7 but I've had the problem in Beta6 (and earlier) and it's still there in Beta8.

2. My "Local Videos" folder for the YouTube plugin still has my previously downloaded videos listed, but it does not play them unless I'm connected to the internet. That is, it won't play from my downloaded files; instead it treats them like bookmarks.

I had my videos, under Beta6, downloaded to /media/mmc1/youtube. I thought maybe that was the problem after the update, so I went into Xterm and entered
cd /home/user/.canola/youtube
mv videos/* /media/mmc1/youtube
ln -s /media/mmc1/youtube videos
both as "user" ($ prompt) and, since that didn't seem to work, as root (# prompt).

But the problem persists. Canola doesn't play my video files when I select them from "Local Videos".

[handful]

@dan
Handful,
Very nice update. The podcast and youtube are great additions. The lips sync here is better than in MyTube. Although I can't get player to recognize the MyTube videos.

- please try setting mytube to save to the same diretory. it watched by canola, then refresh media.

I do like that now I can scroll without it being so sensitive that it jumps to a video. I also for the first got the finger keyboard to come up. It only took eight months and your update! Hehehehe!!! Dan

- Funny, we did change things in beta 7, but now in beta8 to 9 we have a really improved experimental list (not included) that we will be "testing" with volunteers. I think this will reach the quality we aimed.


I would like to see audiobooks. I just listened for the first time to Dracula. Very entertaining.

- Yeah, I think that his is a great idea for a plugin :)


What I'm seeing is that Canola is evolving into a complete media center. Why not add features to enable playback of recorded or live TV, Satellite, Cable etc... ?

- We actually tried, we had a team working with MythtV, etc but it not that easy. It doesn depend only on us, it depends on people having the right hardware, that hardware having a software that public allows (api) to be manipulated /streamed. Really not that easy. But I think any vendor interested would be able to create a plugin for their product.

Keep up the great work! Dan

Thanks in behalf of the team!

[handful]

... When I am at the "now playing" screen, and attempt to lo...

-hal


Hi Hal, thanks for the report, I think may be some mess with the events then... I will pass it forward.




Hi, handful! Two problems.

1. I've mentioned this one before, and it remains the same: if I have played a movie for a while, pausing it does not fully pause it, it just keeps stuttering forward. I didn't install Beta7 but I've had the problem in Beta6 (and earlier) and it's still there in Beta8.




We still not able to reproduce it, are you using mplayer or default media player to play the video?

2. My "Local Videos" folder for the YouTube plugin still has my previously downloaded videos listed, but it does not play them unless I'm connected to the internet. That is, it won't play from my downloaded files; instead it treats them like bookmarks.

- That a bug then, we will fix it.

I had my videos, under Beta6, downloaded to /media/mmc1/youtube. I thought maybe that was the problem after the update, so I went into Xterm and entered
cd /home/user/.canola/youtube
mv videos/* /media/mmc1/youtube
ln -s /media/mmc1/youtube videos
both as "user" ($ prompt) and, since that didn't seem to work, as root (# prompt).

But the problem persists. Canola doesn't play my video files when I select them from "Local Videos".

- Beta8 only uses the now configurable download folders, Its quite odd your bug, but we will investigate.


cheers

[handful]

vvaz : you can send to handful AT gmail.

Mike : All videos still stretched to fullscreen. again, we don't play sound or video. We open a canvas and glue a mplayer / default player window.

What happens is : Mplayer direct player doesn't have the strectch problem because it's only for the embedded problem. The sync problem must be also the same.

Since we started youtube we knew that mplayer was able to play some videos and not able to play others.

I will again, flash a device, and do everything from scratch, to see default results expected once ore time : /

Marcelo

[GeraldKo]

I had my videos, under Beta6, downloaded to /media/mmc1/youtube. I thought maybe that was the problem after the update, so I went into Xterm and entered
cd /home/user/.canola/youtube
mv videos/* /media/mmc1/youtube
ln -s /media/mmc1/youtube videos
both as "user" ($ prompt) and, since that didn't seem to work, as root (# prompt).

But the problem persists. Canola doesn't play my video files when I select them from "Local Videos".

- Beta8 only uses the now configurable download folders, Its quite odd your bug, but we will investigate.




This was a bug only with regard to updating, and I may have given you the impression that it was a bigger problem than that. Canola couldn't find what I had saved prior to updating, but it works fine with what I've downloaded since. It's not a bug that could recur with future updates (unless you change again where the files are stored). So I don't think it's worth investigating. But thanks!

[MikeL]

Mike : All videos still stretched to fullscreen. again, we don't play sound or video. We open a canvas and glue a mplayer / default player window.

What happens is : Mplayer direct player doesn't have the stretch problem because it's only for the embedded problem. The sync problem must be also the same.Testing the same youtube video on N800 with beta 7 with mplayer v24 and sound/video are in perfect sync within Canola2 Beta7 whilst video is stretched.

So for me there is a problem with Canola beta8 combined with mplayer 26, where if I play the same video in mplayer 26 only, sync on N810 appears to be fine.
(Canola beta 8 = video/audio out of sync)

So for myself with latest Canola2 beta8 on my N810 YouTube playback is currently worse with a lot more YouTube videos than appears to be case with Canola 2 Beta7 on my N800.

Should I now try a Canola2 clean-up and fresh install of Canola2 Beta8 on N810, or would you first like additional test information etc.

[handful]

Testing the same youtube video on N800 with beta 7 with mplayer v24 and sound/video are in perfect sync within Canola2 Beta7 whilst video is stretched.

So for me there is a problem with Canola beta8 combined with mplayer 26, where if I play the same video in mplayer 26 only, sync on N810 appears to be fine.
(Canola beta 8 = video/audio out of sync)

So for myself with latest Canola2 beta8 on my N810 YouTube playback is currently worse with a lot more YouTube videos than appears to be case with Canola 2 Beta7 on my N800.

Should I now try a Canola2 clean-up and fresh install of Canola2 Beta8 on N810, or would you first like additional test information etc.

The problem is then with .26 embedded mode. Because as reported before we don't do anything but provide a canvas for mplayer to draw upon.

[MikeL]

The problem is then with .26 embedded mode. Because as reported before we don't do anything but provide a canvas for mplayer to draw upon.OK, I posted BUG report for mplayer .26 https://garage.maemo.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2421&group_id=54&atid=269

Am I only Canola2 user noticing this issue?

[sachin007]

Hello handful.

Just wanted to confirm. Are we supposed to get stream info when we tune into an internet radio stream? Well it doesn't show any stream info when i play an internet radio station. So is this going to happen in the future?

[Glenn7500]

OK, I posted BUG report for mplayer .26 https://garage.maemo.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2421&group_id=54&atid=269

Am I only Canola2 user noticing this issue?

I am experiencing the same issue.

[vvaz]

So for myself with latest Canola2 beta8 on my N810 YouTube playback is currently worse with a lot more YouTube videos than appears to be case with Canola 2 Beta7 on my N800.


Disclaimer: one device and can give only my impressions.

N800, OS2007.

I have an impression that sync Beta8+mplayer26 is better than Beta7+mplayer24. Note that at the same time there are much more chokes on videos so overall experience is worse on newer combination.

[El Amir]

am i the only one not being able to see .flv files (downloaded from the canola plugin aswell as from the mytube application) in the "video" section, even after setting up the right directories in canola and refreeshing?

except for that, Canola works like a charm :)
great work Team Canola!!!

[MikeL]

am i the only one not being able to see .flv files (downloaded from the canola plugin aswell as from the mytube application) in the "video" section, even after setting up the right directories in canola and refreshing?You are aware that you can quickly find your Canola2 saved YouTube videos under C2.tube icon, by scrolling down to the last option "Local Videos"

[AstralStorm]

I'm still getting no Vorbis files in this version of Canola...

EDIT: Nuked configs and logging now, I'll see how it goes.
EDIT2: No luck. The log is here: http://pastebin.ca/975720

[vvaz]

vvaz : you can send to handful AT gmail.



Example why gmail is overhyped -

Remote host said: 552-5.2.3 Your message exceeded Gmail's size limits. Please visit
552-5.2.3 http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=8770

20 MB of limit??? WTF?

[El Amir]

You are aware that you can quickly find your Canola2 saved YouTube videos under C2.tube icon, by scrolling down to the last option "Local Videos"

I am aware of that thannks but it only includes videos from the Canola plugin, i was trying to get ALL the videos I downloaded from Youtube through the 2 programs (Mytube + the canola plugin) in one place :)

[handful]

Astral : Etrunko is going to post a issue on the Ogg support thread.

Guys: the videos are not showing in the media library, because unfortunately there's still no support for FLV in the scanner. We will do this in the next week, and it will be perfect working on the next release. For now use the "Local Video" options on the youtube menu (there you can actually access the local video and DELETE them) not possible on the main menu.

Also : The internet access problem is due to change of the folder, so do all you folders selections first THEN download the files.

Br

Marcelo

[handful]

Vvaz: can you please split in packages of less then 20mb "?

Sorry for the trouble,

Marcelo

[spice3d]

Marcelo:

Beta 8 installed without a hitch. Last time I had to use the manual install method. I also don't seem to be getting the short volume bursts any longer at the beginning of songs. Played a little with the youtube plugin and it seemed to work fine for me.

ALBUM COVER TIP: I found that I get much better results getting album covers if my songs are arranged in subdirs, like \Music\Artist\Album\Songs. Initially, I had most of my songs like this, but a handful all dumped in \Music. I discovered that it was only the handful of songs that had missing or incorrect covers after using the Album Covers utility. I moved all of them to Artist\Album\Songs subdirs and I got 100% of the covers except for a few odd songs. (I don't know if this also results from having album art named folder.jpg in each subdir.)

[handful]

Spice : yes, exactly album cover gets first from the folder.jpg than from embedded then from the internet. Of course the internet is the less reliable way : /

I'm happy to hear that you don't have any problems, problably you don't have any "devel" grade repository / etc.

Marcelo

[cLin]

handful: how hard would it be to make the songs preload so when it goes to next song, it doesn't need to wait a few seconds before starting? Or is it possible? That way I could listen to songs seamlessly.

[handful]

cLin: we are doing the fast way possible with today insfrastructure. I'm the one that is really after those effects, but as we are using the default media player, we need to wait for it to start the new song etc.

For example, this is why we don't have gapless playback. : / If we had time we would be using another player, optimized by us probably based on the Xine (libxine) to solve this..


BR

Marcelo

[iliaden]

Hi,

came back to civilization...

For example, this is why we don't have gapless playback. : / If we had time we would be using another player, optimized by us probably based on the Xine (libxine) to solve this..

Didn't have much time to examine the issue, but I believe that xmms has a fadein/out plugin that preloads the next song. You might want to take a look.

copy the issue reported before on the "lock screen using the action key stops playback". I just wait for the timeout, so it's not a big problem.
proposed solution: ignoring the key input following the power button?

no major problems to report so far. My computer got a spamming virus (sorry everyone... :( ). I had to rip the network cable out, and send symantec and caspersky loose to find it. (successful result... i'll back it up with antivira just in case).
This being said, i'll send you the package with the media for albums in a few days.


I found that I get much better results getting album covers if my songs are arranged in subdirs, like \Music\Artist\Album\Songs.

sounds interesting... what if the music's ID3 tag does not correspond with the folder name (since i'm manually tagging almost everything)? would it still work? would I need to rename the folder?
Personal thought: this tip should *cough*MUST*cough* be posted on the official canloa site. Extremely useful, if you ask me.

didn't have much time to address the youtube issue either. Might reinstall MPlayer and check.

last note (for now): the last.fm problem that is the MOST annoying is the fact that i need to double-click (sometimes triple) in order to get to the next song. kinda takes the focus off my job... (that I should be doing instead of slacking off)

Good Luck

Ilia

[spice3d]

Something just occurred to me, when playing a song, shouldn't the display show something like "05 of 12" to indicate its playing the 5th track in a list of 12? That would be nice. In fact, I'd also like to see track numbers on the list of songs on an album.

[spice3d]

sounds interesting... what if the music's ID3 tag does not correspond with the folder name (since i'm manually tagging almost everything)? would it still work? would I need to rename the folder?
Personal thought: this tip should *cough*MUST*cough* be posted on the official canloa site. Extremely useful, if you ask me.


I suspect that the subdir hierachy and naming is not so important for getting the correct album art. What's important is having all of the songs of one album together in one subdir. Well, along with a folder.jpg image and properly named ID3 tags. The artist/album/songs structure is just a good organizational structure for us humans.

Marcello can correct me if I'm wrong :-)

[handful]

Didn't have much time to examine the issue, but I believe that xmms has a fadein/out plugin that preloads the next song. You might want to take a look.

if you are using gstreamer theres no way to do tha ton the device today : / We will take a look on what they are doing (theres other ways to do it, but you need some new player infrastructure), but not playing audio with the default gstreamer is a pain : /

The lock screen problem : is already solved on our dev branch. Will be on beta 9.


Well the tip is not a tip. Theres no "improvements" on getting covers :) the thing is :

cover works like this :
search for a folder jpg file
Search for embedded cover in mp3s
searches the internet :)

so if you have the file on the folder it doesn't even matter the organization.

And about the website : I can say that people don't read it :)

The last.fm problem is already on the known issues :) see how people don't read things :) ? so you should just make sure to "disable" shuffle and repeat on the audio player. Fix is under way.

Br

Marcelo

[handful]

Spice : maybe. this info is important, and may enter soon on the UI.

Br

marcelo

[iliaden]

I guess you're right about the site reading. Or maybe, since canola usage is quite straightforward, you can add the "tips" category.

On a completely unrelated topic: thank you for releasing the photoshop layout for the themes; I will create my own in my spare time. afterwards, what do I need to do with the .psd file to make canola see it as a theme?
and 2: is is possible to add a this (1pixel wide) grid to see better where the images finish (i will change the art; need to know the exact size)

Thank you

Ilia

[handful]

Hi Iliaden :

About the themes: Do you have photoshop right? So, the reason we released the layout is actually because it contains the grid (slices) and correct names already given.

So, if you hit (command+ k) or (control+k on win) you will see the limits (actually they are the real slice guidelines) and you can click with the right button for more info on the slice's name. Once you're done you just need to click : export to web (disable the background first of course) and then you export only the changed slices to a folder.

This will generate your set your images.

the way available today is only with the desktop build on linux, to really test and compile. So we are finishing a tool for windows / mac users that you will get your folder (with the images) upload to our webservice, and get some screenshots of the theme, then you can just download a ready-to-install debian.

Tarkam is also interested in help in this area, so I think it will be fast available.

If you managed to do your theme, maybe in the first one we can compile and send your edj file to you to test on the device :)))

We will make a step by step guide for the basic (images) theming ok?

BR

Marcelo

[iliaden]

thanks a lot.

It will take me 1-2 weeks to make a theme i'll actually be glad of ;)

and another question just popped: on a n800, with a USB host adapter, is there any way for Canola to see the media that is on an external drive?
note: maemo does see all the data flawlessly.

Should I add a shortcut for the external drive somewhere in flash, or is there another way guaranteed to work?

thank you

Ilia

[handful]

Hi Illiaden,

Actually we tested this today :) one ipod connected via USB with more than 10gb of songs, scanning took 1 minute :)

I think you just need to mount it and it will appear on the media folders :)
mark for scanning ..

Marcelo

[iliaden]

small help required: procedure for mount!!!

in /dev/, I have
usbdev1.4_ep00
usbdev1.4_ep01
usbdev1.4_ep81

It's a 4gb flash drive.

command line instruction plz!

thank you

Ilia

[iliaden]

ok... some update on the procedure:
in /dev, the correct file to mount is "sda1"

Q: where to mount?
if I mount on /media/usb, canola doesn't recognize it.
Thinking of mounting on /media/mmc2.
was unable to do this since I'm booting from internal flash card.
unmounted /media/mmc1, mounted /dev/sda1 /media/mmc1
"success" : all the media was recognized; but not what I had on external flash.

any way to make both available?


IMPORTANT NOTE: at the end of this procedure, the bottom buttons disappeared again. (need a screenshot, or what I posted in beta7 is ok?)
another bug noted: loss of cyrilic support. (screenshot below)


Ilia

[iliaden]

hi,

sorry, i had the devel version of MPlayer; reinstalled everything
Canola still does not support usb media (unable to add to library from default mount /dev/sda1 /media/usb)
the only player that works flawlessly with usb media is MediaBox. unfortunately it doesn't have the shuffle option.

so my question is: can Canola play usb media, or do I need to mount it on any flash card, in an empty folder?
edit: this procedure allows canloa to see the files, yet it is unable to play them: loading cursor -> disappearance of track indicator & length of media (says 0:00 out of 0:00). I quit canola and unmounted the usb drive from the empty folder.

how did you manage to do it?

Ilia

P.S. I'll redo the test for experimental kinetic scrolling soon.

[morphbr]

hi,

Canola still does not support usb media (unable to add to library from default mount /dev/sda1 /media/usb)

so my question is: can Canola play usb media, or do I need to mount it on any flash card, in an empty folder?
edit: this procedure allows canloa to see the files, yet it is unable to play them: loading cursor -> disappearance of track indicator & length of media (says 0:00 out of 0:00). I quit canola and unmounted the usb drive from the empty folder.

how did you manage to do it?



Hi,

You need to mount the media, there is no way of doing it differently. I did not take a look on MediaBox but for sure it's mounting the device =)

Now, the problem is that you could see the media but was not able to play it. Are these mp3 files ? Could you please try to play this files from the default media player ?

BR,

[briand]

...and, after you mounted the media and re-started Canola, did you then scan your media folders in the Canola Setup/Utilities menu? (...or, is that only germane to videos?)

[GeraldKo]

After closing a Canola2 Beta8 session, Canola usually can't find my downloaded podcasts when next launched.

I download a podcast and the My Feeds menu puts it in bold. Maybe I listen to part of it. I close Canola, turn off my N800. Later I turn my N800 on again and launch Canola again, and that podcast is no longer bold.

If I am not connected to wifi, I can't play that podcast from Canola: I tap on the unbolded title and nothing happens. I can go to the File Manager and launch the podcast from there; it will open in MPlayer.

If I am connected to wifi, I can tap the Download Link and it will immediately show it as downloaded and go bold. That is, although I can get to it only if I'm connected, it's not really downloading but rather it is discovering the already-downloaded file.

The podcast files are where you would expect them to be: /media/mmc1/My downloads/Podcasts/

[briand]

Geraldko --

I'm not seeing that behavior here. I usually grab the woot.com podcast before I get to work (and, a couple times, surf the public wifi's along the way, and grab it *while* I'm on my way to work!), and play it later (at work) where I don't have wifi access.

I'm playing this morning's podcast, right now, as I type this reponse....

[handful]

GeraldKO : this is a really unnexpected behavior... we will try to replicate here, can you send the feed (I know it doesn't matter too much ) but it can help...

Marcelo

[GeraldKo]

GeraldKO : this is a really unnexpected behavior... we will try to replicate here, can you send the feed (I know it doesn't matter too much ) but it can help...

Marcelo

http://www.democracynow.org/podcast.xml

http://kuow.org/rss.php?program=weekday&display=10

(Presuming those make sense as responses to your questions; they're my only podcasts and it's been several weeks since I set them up.)

It happens with both my podcast subscriptions, so I doubt that it is related to a specific feed. But since you say this is unusual, wait before trying to replicate. Today it hasn't done it, so I'll see tomorrow if today's downloads are accessible from within Canola. And if there is still a problem, I'll bring it up again.

[GeraldKo]

GeraldKO : this is a really unnexpected behavior... we will try to replicate here, can you send the feed (I know it doesn't matter too much ) but it can help...

Marcelo

Marcelo, you want to see some really unexpected behavior? For this feed, all Thursdays appear like in this screenshot!

http://i248.photobucket.com/albums/gg175/geraldko22/screenshot03.png

[iliaden]

hi,
I created a empty folder
/media/mmc2 # mkdir floppy
#mount /dev/sda1 /media/mmc2/floppy
canola;

the mp3's there play perfectly on the default media player & MediaBox.


...and, after you mounted the media and re-started Canola, did you then scan your media folders in the Canola Setup/Utilities menu? (...or, is that only germane to videos?)

yup; canola recognized them and displayed them in all the lists (all music; albums; album covers...)
when I select any track, canola says it's loading it, then stops playing it, and removes the indicator from the progress bar.


You need to mount the media, there is no way of doing it differently. I did not take a look on MediaBox but for sure it's mounting the device =)

there IS a way of doing it differently; otherwise I wouldn't have mentioned MediaBox: that program just asks you which folders you want to play, and gives you a display similar to the default file manager. There, I selected internal media card, external card and "removable storage device/music" (/music is a folder I created on the USB)

without any mounting, it works perfectly. with mounting elsewhere than /media/usb, it does not work.

specs: n800, OS2008, jolouis's USB b to female adapter, 4gb SanDisk cruzer micro USB drive

maybe add a similar media select to Canola as in MediaBox (take a look- neat interface, kinetic scrolling, finger-friendly (with a few weak spots), USB support!. lacks shuffle/repeat though). If I'm not mistaking it's opensource.
http://mediabox.garage.maemo.org/

Ilia

P.S. can someone remind me of the syntaxis for hyperlinks in html?

[handful]

Ilia,

We know mediabox, there must be some problem related to our dbus message to the default media player to play the file (mediabox uses mplayer) and thus we will find and kill the bug.

We can go into some of the points you've said but I don't think is important for that matter.

We got your problem, we are investigating but we do have our goals, and We will not make like mediabox. At all. This difference is the nice thing about maemo / open platforms. Media box fits for a lot of users, we fit to others, Ukmp fits to others... I respect pycage for it's effort and for conducting (almost?) solely this project, but we have different goals. like himself says "Canola is not a media center" and I never say anything back. (Maybe he never used frontrow, but I really don't care) and also I am (truly) proud of not only MB, but also UKMP and kagu because we did a lot of work to push python forward, we did a lot of work to optmize even the pygame he uses to draw stuff and in our minds this work was a success helped also by those really neat python applications, by those brave solo developers.

What we can say is : you still have options, and we always refund the non-satisfied customers :)))

there IS a way of doing it differently; otherwise I wouldn't have mentioned MediaBox: that program just asks you which folders you want to play, and gives you a display similar to the default file manager. There, I selected internal media card, external card and "removable storage device/music" (/music is a folder I created on the USB)

Just to make clear : WHEN YOU PLUG A USB THING : IT MOUNTS if it doesn't, you need to mount manually. it's a basic unix principle. The only thing we need to see is what is happening when you hit play (the message is sent to the default media player engine) and it's not being interpreted.

So please: can you remember that everysingle software has bugs, has features lacking, and if they are in beta, they are evolving. For the love of god, people seems to "demand" that everything they need should be working, in the way THEY think is good, and in the timeframe they think is reasonable. Any applications (be it canola, mediabox or wordpy or mapper) is a result of long coding hours, debugging hours and while I'm incredible patient I also have limits to what I consider to be a little bit too much of demands from some users.

This will be fixed? Yes. This should work in the easiest way possible (in safe conditions) ? Probably.

Sorry if this sounds rude, but please bare in mind that things takes time.

Marcelo

[handful]

Gerald : this is even stranger! This used to happen in beta2 and 3 I believe, quite strange that is back again.

This is already into investigation, and I also want to know what is causing this : // these parsing problems should not happen any more, or at least give a meaningful error message could help.

Also: we are including an about section in the settings to hold some information that will be valuable to reporting problems!

Thanks for the effort in reproducing the error for us!

Marcelo

[iliaden]

sorry for that.

could you mention how you got an ipod to work on canola? I could work around from that...

I liked Canola for it's relatively lightweight player capacities (audio & youtube); lightweight compared to most other players (exception: youamp). I tried something that I would believe to be a feature (playback from USB). If it does not work or is not supported (yet), just say this directly.
Since Canola isn't open-source, I cannot modify it myself to my liking. This is why I try to report you the bugs that I find - to make this player better.

now, I get the following:
while usb drive is mounted on /media/usb, canola loads as usual
as soon as I mount it on /media/mmc2/floppy, Canola stopped loading.


#canola -vvv
[...] loading until
DEBUG controller:111:get_controller_class_for_model() found controller class with filter 'Controller/WaitNotify'! [ok until here]
process 5320: D-Bus library appears to be incorrectly set up; failed to read machine uuid: Failed to open "/var/lib/dbus/machine-id": No such file or directory
See the manual page for dbus-uuidgen to correct this issue.
D-Bus not built with -rdynamic so unable to print a backtrace
Aborted
#


i'll try to find dbus libraries and reinstall them...

Ilia

P.S. just found out something even more peculiar: while usb is mounted on /media/mmc2/floppy, I cannot launch canola from X terminal (result described above), but I CAN launch it from the applications menu.
when launched, canola sees all the media that is on the USB.
Launched a file from USB: no cursor to indicate position, timer going on left, audio playing!

edit 2: nope: disappearance of position & total time is only true for the first track. as soon as I clicked on the next track, everything went back to normal. only problem remaining: why doesn't canola work from command line, but does from applications?

[handful]

Hi Ilia,

MorpheuZ is here to help you on that, he's responsible for the whole player part, and thus he can help you.

About the USB we were aware, but when I told you that we did, was really "accidental" because we didn't have any official support still. Maybe MorpheuZ didn't told me if it was canola running on maemo or canola running on Mamona (it could be different). But anyways, we will indeed find out why this is behaving like that.

The natural behavior we see is : if there's a new pluglable device we can ask if you want to scan that device for media...and do the scan right away and then you have access to it.

So let's see how can we solve this issue : / if we find out anything that is helpful you for sure will be the first one to know :)

Cheers,

Marcelo

[iliaden]

Thank you!

right now it's working quite acceptably (although I need to keep in mind that I cannot touch my flash card - don't want to know the consequences). the only noticeable downside to my way of running it right now is the complete lack of cyrillic support (sceenshot a few post before). Not a great loss since it's music that I'm listening to - not reading the author's names...

as for the dbus problems, I might have a clue: in order to get mouse support, I installed the following :

DBUS-Scripts
http://www.electronicproductonline.com/catalog/supportFiles/dbus-scripts_1.0.3_armel.deb

USB Mouse:
http://www.electronicproductonline.com/catalog/supportFiles/usbMouse_0.1_armel.deb

the second one is a mouse polling soft (displays onscreen mouse when USB mouse is plugged in).
the first one, however, might be interfering with canola. will remove it tomorrow and see the results. Will inform you asap. (although why would canola work directly and not through xterm is beyond me)

[spice3d]

One thing I noticed that I don't remember happening with beta 7, but when playing WMAs the audio is choppy if I move through the UI while a song is playing. The choppiness stops as soon as I stop touching the UI. Does not happen with MP3s. Note that I'm using the .26 version of MPlayer. I'm not sure, but I "think" I was using the built-in N800 player with beta 7.

[handful]

Spice3d : Can you make a simple test? Run the same file on the default media player and try to see if the cpu goes higher? Why : if this is happening is because the cpu is jumping, then if playing (media engine) is consuming cpu there's no cpu for Canola to animate screens.

Mp3s are by far the best optimized on the device (IMHO) and this is why it doesn't make the canola choppy : /

Let me know how the same files are playing on the regular media player.

Marcelo

[morphbr]

One thing I noticed that I don't remember happening with beta 7, but when playing WMAs the audio is choppy if I move through the UI while a song is playing. The choppiness stops as soon as I stop touching the UI. Does not happen with MP3s. Note that I'm using the .26 version of MPlayer. I'm not sure, but I "think" I was using the built-in N800 player with beta 7.

You can try editing .atabake/config and put inside the file:
wma=oms

this will ensure that it'll play wma with the built-in player.

BR,

[spice3d]

@marcello: Yup, confirmed. Forcing Canola to use built-in player using morphbr's tip above plays WMAs smoothly.

Thx morphbr

[hfw01]

I'm having an issue with the 'New Episodes List.' If I delete something from the 'My Feeds' view, and do not exit out of Canola, they remain in the New Episode list. If I exit, and come back in, they are gone. I guess it speeds up performance for the list not to regenerate every time we look at.

Not sure what the right answer is.

Hal

[spartanNTX]

I haven't seen this mentioned yet, so please forgive me if this is a repost.

I primarily use the 'Play Random' list of music inside of Canola to listen to my mp3s. I typically start up canola, and leave it running most of the day listening to my entire lib.

With this current release, after the first couple of songs have played, when a song stops a 1 or 2 second clip of random media will occasionally play before the next song in the 'Play Random' list. Sometimes, audio from a video will even play :eek: I have noticed a much longer lag between songs as well.

I upgraded to the current release, and I don't have any mplayer or anything installed as far as I know beyond what came installed with my n810. Keep up the good work guys!

[Laughing Man]

Hmm I don't have the back button (lower left) in Canola. The thing is though... it had it when I first reinstalled it on my mmcboot yesterday. But now it seems to have dissapeared.

Edit: Interesting..

My Hildon_desktop's cpu usage is skyrocketing (I don't think it's due to Canola). But anyway, what's happening is without my 16 GB SDHC card in, the hildon_desktop cpu usage is at 10% (roughly around there). Load up canola, it loads fast and there's a back button.

Now stick in the card to my external slot, watch it skyrocket. Canola takes forever to load and no back button. Hmm..

[disq]

last.fm plugin is problematic scrobbling played tracks. you see an error on the last.fm profile page (instead of scrobbled tracks) which will say "album info incorrect" or something like that. sorry i didn't save the message. oh, and they scrobble fine with kagu+maemoscrobbler so the problem is in the plugin and not the files.

[ferjant]

to be honest, never really like Canola before til now. last time ive used it was last year. anyways, downloaded the newest updates, themes, last.fm and youtube plugin. WOW i was really surprised, it works like a charm! to add, like the photos function (similar to iTouch coverflow). amazing guys, keep it up!

[handful]

Hei Ferjant

This is really nice to hear :) it's a proof that we are not "sleeping" we are listening, doing and running towards the final version :))) ( I hope so )

Marcelo


Disq: can you please test a little bit more, and see if the problem repeats it self, and tell us the song and send the files? Maybe some silly enconding problem is happening that is not being accepted by last.fm.

We will fix asap once you help us with more information

Marcelo

[iliaden]

Hi Marcelo,

Sorry, was quite busy in the past 1-2 weeks (all college midterms are now - only 1 left!).

USB "problem" update:
1- system does not allow the creation of a symbolic link from USB (either /dev/sda1 nor /media/usb/sda1) to any flash card
2- system allows symbolic link to /home/user/MyDocs/.sounds ; canola does not follow folders in there - only the files in that folder
3- mounting /dev/sda1 onto any empty folder on any media card works.

next - language support: I'll check on my desktop to make sure, but can you tell me:
1) does Canola support cyrillic windows encoding for the ID3 tags
2) which ID3 tags does canola read v1 or v2?


finally: I created a brighter theme. here's the link:
http://adrive.com/public/ac4cc7e2f4c16479c955cca32388445ddd115f254927bb576e 8361b5bd9b9d66.html
note: forgot to rename it; call it "clear_orange", or something better if you guys have imagination ;)
Could you compile it and sent it to denotkine @ gmail.com

one last question: where does Canola remember the ratings I gave for the music (0-5 stars); I know it's not on the file itself, nor in the folder - is it somewhere in the system? If I move a folder (say ~100 tracks), and I want to keep the ratings, what file should I edit?
note: if there is no easy way of doing it - don't spend any time (it's a MINOR inconvenience, which can be easily overlooked)

Keep up the good work

Ilia

P.S. it's been almost 3 weeks - when's the next release due?
P.P.S. - installed the latest MPlayer (V.27, ~3 days old) - will give feedback soon.

[jabastien]

Hello Marcelo,

:rolleyes:Please add functionalities in future release if possible:
1. Ability to keep audio or video even if I unsubscribe to a feed
2. Ability to remove items in the “Best Rated” after I have deleted the Podcast. Currently, I have to re-download the cast then remove the ratings to remove from “Best Rated”
3. Ability to set the number of Podcast to list per feed (i.e. top 5 of 10 Podcast per feed). Some feed list all episodes and canola takes too long to parse and drain the battery.

:(Annoyances:
1. I find it annoying when I have to dig through menu for my Podcast. Is it possible to move the “Podcast” button as part of the main menu since it can play both audio and video.

2. Canola responds to global button input even when it’s not the foreground application. Canola pauses when I use the hardware select key to “Lock touch screen and keys”. This is a new behavior to beta 8.

:pI also was wondering if the Podcast module can be taken out of canola and become a plug-in.


Thank you:D,
Jacques

[jhoff80]

Still having stretched out videos whenever I play anything in Canola, and also, the covers view is still entirely wrong. I've said this a few times before. I know when you read you go left to right first and then down to the next row, but for something like this, it makes much more sense to go up>down, then left to right. The reason is because for large collections if you scroll all the way to the right, then when you want to continue alphabetically in your album list then you have to scroll all the way left again.

[handful]

Still having stretched out videos whenever I play anything in Canola, and also, the covers view is still entirely wrong. I've said this a few times before. I know when you read you go left to right first and then down to the next row, but for something like this, it makes much more sense to go up>down, then left to right. The reason is because for large collections if you scroll all the way to the right, then when you want to continue alphabetically in your album list then you have to scroll all the way left again.

Hi, Strectch videos are one known issue of Mplayer embedded mode. We already fixed it, but it will only be available once the new mplayer version is released.

Covers: I know it, it still on the list the regular grid, but we are facing resource problems, so visual things are left for later.

Cheers

[handful]

Hi Marcelo,

USB "problem" update:
1- system does not allow the creation of a symbolic link from USB (either /dev/sda1 nor /media/usb/sda1) to any flash card
2- system allows symbolic link to /home/user/MyDocs/.sounds ; canola does not follow folders in there - only the files in that folder
3- mounting /dev/sda1 onto any empty folder on any media card works.



next - language support: I'll check on my desktop to make sure, but can you tell me:
1) does Canola support cyrillic windows encoding for the ID3 tags
2) which ID3 tags does canola read v1 or v2?

In our test with russing songs, it worked : / it not working for you? Canola reads all versions of id3Tags. but it better if you v2.4 I believe.


finally: I created a brighter theme. here's the link:
http://adrive.com/public/ac4cc7e2f4c...5bd9b9d66.html
note: forgot to rename it; call it "clear_orange", or something better if you guys have imagination
Could you compile it and sent it to denotkine @ gmail.com


Thanks :)


one last question: where does Canola remember the ratings I gave for the music (0-5 stars); I know it's not on the file itself, nor in the folder - is it somewhere in the system? If I move a folder (say ~100 tracks), and I want to keep the ratings, what file should I edit?
note: if there is no easy way of doing it - don't spend any time (it's a MINOR inconvenience, which can be easily overlooked)

Id3 tag? That how we do it (AFAIK) if any developer did a hack to that,he will get beaten :) ( joke )




Keep up the good work

Ilia

P.S. it's been almost 3 weeks - when's the next release due?
being honest : we are having resources problems : / we are really late, and maybe it will take at least 2 weeks.

P.P.S. - installed the latest MPlayer (V.27, ~3 days old) - will give feedback soon.
Yeah, please. some guys said it was really better

[jhoff80]

Hi, Strectch videos are one known issue of Mplayer embedded mode. We already fixed it, but it will only be available once the new mplayer version is released.

Covers: I know it, it still on the list the regular grid, but we are facing resource problems, so visual things are left for later.

Cheers

Which new mplayer version? Because I'm already using v27 from the extras-devel repository.

Also, I know you said that you're having resources issues, but I have to ask anyway, is there any plan for an FM radio plugin for the n800 sometime in the near future? (Either for the developers themselves, or a third-party.)

One last little thing I noticed. I've been using the Flat Black scheme, and quite frankly, the Last.fm plugin icon doesn't match it at all. Everything else is completely black and white, but the Last.fm plugin uses a gradient that doesn't fit in.

[handful]

Hello Marcelo,

Please add functionalities in future release if possible:
1. Ability to keep audio or video even if I unsubscribe to a feed
>>> I commented about that. This was a developer thing behind my back (they knew I would hate it and I did) so after a lot of fight, we decided to postpone it. They argument is that as they need to write to the database it safer to close everything using it :/ But we will try to improve it. They know how to do it, it just takes time

2. Ability to remove items in the “Best Rated” after I have deleted the Podcast. Currently, I have to re-download the cast then remove the ratings to remove from “Best Rated”

>>> this is really an issue. We will look into it.

3. Ability to set the number of Podcast to list per feed (i.e. top 5 of 10 Podcast per feed). Some feed list all episodes and canola takes too long to parse and drain the battery.

>>> OK, noted.


Annoyances:

1. I find it annoying when I have to dig through menu for my Podcast. Is it possible to move the “Podcast” button as part of the main menu since it can play both audio and video.

>>> Well, sorry for that but as podcast has only podcast it complicated to add a first level menu with no children at all :/ I will see with the guys how to make you throw podcast on the home with just one line configuring :)

2. Canola responds to global button input even when it’s not the foreground application. Canola pauses when I use the hardware select key to “Lock touch screen and keys”. This is a new behavior to beta 8.

>>> This was fixed.

I also was wondering if the Podcast module can be taken out of canola and become a plug-in.
>>> a plugin for who? it's already a canola plugin? :))) You mean a separated application? Well, you can do the following, remove all other plugins from your canola and have only podcast :)
But: No, All canola plugins are heavily depended on Canola, so becoming a standalone application would mean actually removing canola : / so it's impossible by the time. But as I said, it is possible to have only podcast and settings :)

BR

[iliaden]

In our test with russing songs, it worked : / it not working for you? Canola reads all versions of id3Tags. but it better if you v2.4 I believe.

mine does not work :(
I'll send you the files (unless your release is due tomorrow... then i'll wait and verify for the new release).
Right now, the tags are displayed the same as on a windows with no cyrillic support: with a,e,i,o,u, and A LOT of accents.

If you have no problems, could you suggest any software for tagging, that have filename->ID3?
(no OSX soft, please!)

thank you.

Ilia

[iliaden]

finally: I created a brighter theme. here's the link:
http://adrive.com/public/ac4cc7e2f4c...5bd9b9d66.html
note: forgot to rename it; call it "clear_orange", or something better if you guys have imagination
Could you compile it and sent it to denotkine @ gmail.com
Thanks


hope you're not having any trouble... did I do anything wrong?
I kept all the names, so the problem shouldn't be there.
Or can you share the tool you created for the theme generation - I have debian if needed?

thank you.

Ilia

[jabastien]

>>> a plugin for who? it's already a canola plugin? :))) You mean a separated application? Well, you can do the following, remove all other plugins from your canola and have only podcast :)
But: No, All canola plugins are heavily depended on Canola, so becoming a standalone application would mean actually removing canola : / so it's impossible by the time. But as I said, it is possible to have only podcast and settings :)

I'm asking if the Podcast module could be an installable/removable plugin just like the youtube plugin. I currently have 2 N800's and one is basically for the car. I'm waiting for the Car version :D. I just would like to see a very lightweight or very modular canola. Keep it simple, and only install the modules I want.

[jhoff80]

Okay, also, I have a .mp4 video, encoded using an iPod/ PSP profile. It plays perfectly in mplayer and in Media Player. However, when I try to watch it in Canola, it just looks as if its paused and doesn't show anything at all.

[thecubed]

2. Canola responds to global button input even when it’s not the foreground application. Canola pauses when I use the hardware select key to “Lock touch screen and keys”. This is a new behavior to beta 8.

>>> This was fixed.



That's odd... I have updated to the latest version (application manager shows no new updates for Canola), and still I seem to have problems locking and unlocking the screen.

Example:
I start playing a song, then I press the power button then the center button to lock the screen. Canola then stops playing. Puzzled, I press the power button then the center button to unlock, and Canola begins playing once again.

It's a minor problem, and I am in no way upset-- Canola is the best program I have used on the iTT so far, and it seems to grab so much attention at school also :)

Is there any remedy for this problem so far? It's okay if I have to wait for a while, it's not a huge problem.

Again, thanks to the whole Canola team for the awesome program!

[handful]

Thecubed : because it was fixed in our trunk, beta8 still the only available one, I forgot to put (fixed on our development trunk) sorry,.

The remedy : press the screen button :) or... invert the sequence. Pause before unlocking if you want it playing and vice versa.. :)

Thanks for the nice words!

Marcelo

[GeraldKo]

After closing a Canola2 Beta8 session, Canola usually can't find my downloaded podcasts when next launched.

I download a podcast and the My Feeds menu puts it in bold. Maybe I listen to part of it. I close Canola, turn off my N800. Later I turn my N800 on again and launch Canola again, and that podcast is no longer bold.

If I am not connected to wifi, I can't play that podcast from Canola: I tap on the unbolded title and nothing happens. I can go to the File Manager and launch the podcast from there; it will open in MPlayer.

If I am connected to wifi, I can tap the Download Link and it will immediately show it as downloaded and go bold. That is, although I can get to it only if I'm connected, it's not really downloading but rather it is discovering the already-downloaded file.

The podcast files are where you would expect them to be: /media/mmc1/My downloads/Podcasts/

I brought this up previously, then I said it seemed to have fixed itself. But it hasn't. It turns out that I don't even have to turn off my N800.

If I simply close Canola and go offline (simply by leaving where my wifi connection is), when I launch Canola again, some of the already-downloaded podcasts do not show as bold and will not play. Others do still show as bold. If anything, it is the more recently downloaded ones that disappear. Then, as soon as I have wifi, if it hit the download arrow, they immediately show up as fully downloaded and playable.

Actually, I just tested it again, and even if I continuously have wifi, when I re-launch Canola, the podcast I had been listening to and had paused, does not show up bold.

The effect of this is pretty serious in that it means I can't reliably download a podcast and then listen to it without wifi available ... which is sort of the point of a podcast.

[GeraldKo]

[T]he priorities are set for the most requested features. Sorry but bookmark still on the list, but is not really a priority. The save position for podcast is a kind of simple bookmark and it's working but a full bookmark system, maybe will be left for a third party plugin : /

I really cannot commit the team for that now : / sorry

Marcelo

Hi, Marcelo!

I'm not sure what you mean by the "save position for podcast." There is Pause. If I use Pause and I don't close Canola, I can come back to where I was. But if I close Canola, let alone turn off the tablet, the podcast starts from the beginning. Is there some way other than just Pause that saves the position? I don't see it in the manual (http://openbossa.indt.org.br/canola/using.html#imedia).

I can understand bookmarks not being very high priority, but a Save-Position-and-Resume function, which works even if the tablet has been turned off, and can work for multiple files, seems pretty close to indispensable. (When I say "can work for multiple files," what I mean is that I ought to be able to listen to Podcast A for 5 minutes, then Podcast B for 5 minutes, then Podcast C or YouTube video D, and still be able to go back to A or B and not have to start from the beginning.)

Also, in the Podcast listings, can Info be made to work even for a Podcast that is not currently playing or even downloaded? Most my podcasts have a Title and then an Info line. On the Canola screen that lists a feed's podcasts, it will show the beginning of that Info line. So even before being downloaded, Canola has already acquired all the information in that Info line, it just isn't displaying all of it. It does display all of it when a podcast is playing and you click Info in the menu. It would be very useful if you could click Info in the menu and get the entirety of the Info for a Podcast that is selected in the list though not yet downloaded.

[nspeer]

As long as we're talking about Podcasts:

I have a 770 with OS2006. I began having problems with Canola 2 beta 8 after my usual MMC card became corrupted and I had to switch to another MMC card I had, although I don't know what this would have to do with Canola going bad.

Anyway, here's what's happening:

Oftentimes, when Canola tries to launch, it will go to an endless "updating media library". I have to use a StatusBar app to "kill process" in order to shut down Canola.

Even with a fresh install of Canola (after using Canola Clean-up), Canola will sporatically run VERY sluggishly. Click a button....wait 5-10 seconds, click a button...wait etc. Many times it will just hang and I have to "kill process" to shut Canola down. Only other processes running are the Google search applet on desktop, simple launcher, and Osso-Statusbar-CPU.

As far as Podcasts go:

After clicking "my feeds" and waiting a long time for the little 'C' shaped animation at the bottom to finish turning, I click a download arrow on the right. Nothing happens for a while. Eventually, a download begins to SLOWLY happen. Then as the download nears 100%, Canola freezes and reboots my 770. Upon reopening Canola, I have to try and download the podcast all over again. If the download does finish w/o a reboot, clicking to listen to download causes the 'C' to spin again, then stop with all zeros displayed for length of podcast and elapsed time. The tablet freezes up and I have to "kill process" with the statusbar app. Sometimes I get a sort of "split screen" effect where a portion of the right side of the Canola screen is duplicated followed by an auto reboot.

I have used cleanup to delete and reinstalled Canola 3-4 times (after I disabled all repositories except Maemo and Maemo Extras as Handful recommended)...still the same problems.

Help!
thanks,
Neil

[handful]

@geraldKO for sure is indispensable, but we are overloaded, and the main problem is: podcast has only one person, and we still have problems with basic stuff in podcast which is indeed higher than the bookmark.

But I will try to rush this in beta10. Beta9 is already frozen.

Marcelo

[spice3d]

So when is Beta 9 due for release??? I'm dying for it!

[handful]

well it's out!! :)