Notices

The latest MediaBox is out, and I haven't seen any mention of it. I've played with it briefly, and once again it is impressive. The layout is slightly different, it has a thumb-scroller on most windows, and it looks like it supports lyrics (although I don't have any to check it out on). I urge everyone to check it out, and wonder if there is a complete list of changes.

Jay

Hmm it's not in extras, I'm guessing extras-deval?

I just saw an update pop up for it but, it says I couldn't update it because I need mediabox compact theme.

MediaBox, for me, is unintuitive. Is there any user information or manual for it somewhere? Is it based on some other Linux software that might have more how-to info. (It's hard to google and find it since there are other, more established, products called Mediabox that dominate search returns.)

Behaves way too unpredictably for me and the UI stalls all the time. I think it would benefit immensely from simplifying the UI.

Glad it's not just me!

I love the functionality of mediabox, as it is far better than canola, as it has FM radio. Internet radio is better. Canola is unable to play the stations I want to listen to. cover art handling is much superior in Mediabox too. Only thing it's missing for me is a quick way of playing randomly from my whole library

But I cannot get my head around the interface, especially in the car, where I use it most. Canola shines in that respect, as it is clean simple and quick.

serious does it do what is intended to do for you guys, the tablet did not come with such useful app and canola is on halt so i thing we should give some credit to the guy and request some enhancement, also suggesting some features he is very open to them and many suggestions have been already implemented. try it out a tell him what needs to be changed improved etc thanks.

Well, it does work way better than Canola. Unfortunately, it is still not good enough to make it usable on day-to-day basis. The UI is very confusing and kinetic scrolling feels totally wrong when it tends to stall every few seconds. I would (again) strongly suggest reviewing and simplifying the UI and finding a way to prevent it from regular freezing.

MediaBox 0.96.5 is currently only in extras-devel. Thanks for giving early feedback without even having announced it.
The new version has a simplified user interface. I did listen to all your criticism and I am open to new criticism. As Un27Pee already told you, I'm very happy to get feedback and try to make this the best media player for the NITs.

ChangeLog of 0.96.5:

Support for LRC file format for music lyrics

Slideshow in the image viewer

Special lists "50 Recently Played" and "Bookmarked Files"

Sleep and wake up timer (fall asleep and wake up with music or FM radio)

Rewind and fast forward

Shuffle and repeat modes can be switched by clicking the status bar icons

Improved UI rendering performance and reduced memory footprint

Improved search feature with skipping to next and previous results (use up and down on the D-Pad)

Cleaner user interface

Thumbable scrollbar

Translucent dialog screens

Reduced startup time

mplayer backend doesn't intercept key presses anymore

Support for reference nodes in UPnP content directories

Bugfixes


EDIT: 0.96.5 of course, not 0.95.6. I'm starting to get confused with these sub-versions. The next release will hopefully be 0.97, not 0.96.5.1.

You may have to uninstall any additional MediaBox themes you have installed before upgrading. This is because the version strings in the theme dependency declarations where too strict. This should be fixed by now, so once you removed the old theme packages, you hopefully won't have to remove themes for upgrading anymore.