Can Canola2 play video full screen? Also, I find that video that plays in other players fine seems to drop more frames in Canola. Is this a bug or should I be viewing Canola as more of an audio player? What should my video encoding specs be to have an optimal viewing experience?

Hi Dubious :

Yes, you can indeed play videos in fullscreen. Usually what it takes is a touch in the video playing and you get fullscreen. If you are not getting it, it's possible to be the media player not receiving the event correctly (sorry if gets too technical) we have been trying to improve it, but the media player is a component from Nokia thus we cannot change it.

If you have Mplayer installed, Canola uses it for most of the videos. And the fullscreen change works even better (faster)

Drop frames: Actually, canola is not playing the video, so it plays exactly the same speed as it would be played in the "player" : Maemo Default or Mplayer.
Of course it can be sometimes that the CPU is higher, and this can affect mplayer for example, but that's why video only exists in the video window, to avoid that.

So I will not say that this is happening, but then we would need more investigation. but in our tests the playback is the same. EG: all the other players (Kagu, Etc) uses Mplayer.. We can use both... but if you have mplayer should be the same.

What is happening (known issue) was that Mplayer was having sound / image sync issues giving the impression that frames are being dropped.

If this is happening to everyone, it's definitely a bug.

About the video encodings: depends on what you're using, if you're using Mplayer as backend.. try using the specs for it ( I would suggests UK video converter ) that helps a lot creating good quality x performance videos.

Can you please send me the info about your setup?
Do you have mplayer?
What was the format of the video you played?
Did it play better in what player (Kagu, UKMP, MediaBox, Default Media player, Mplayer)?
If possible (and not bigger than 20mb) can you send me a sample file of this happening?
We would gladly add the file to our test media card, and make sure everything is fixed or explained how to fix asap.

BR from Brazil,

Marcelo Eduardo

I have mplayer installed, so Canola2 must be using that. The thing is that the performance of playing the file in Canola2 is noticeably different than playing it in Mplayer. The file is an xvid, variable bitrate, ranging from 400K to 1500K per second. The file samples I have are larger than what you would like to see. The ones I am playing are about 22 minutes in length and about 170 MB.

So is it that the overhead of the Canola2 app is likely too much for my n810 to handle?

Canola2 is beautiful, by the way.

Well it wasn't supposed because of one fact:
When playing the video specially in fullscreen, canola is not using ANY cpu (if just a little bit to listen to events) so this is really not the reason : / But of course the only way to really tell is by testing it : / specially if you say it is noticeably different : / I could setup a FTP for you to upload if possible... can you do that? I'm really curious to investigate this fact.

BR

Marcelo

I reinstalled Canola and I am now able to go full screen. When in full screen the video seems to play better than when not in full screen. I'm not sure if there was an update that I didn't have or if just reinstalling did the trick.

This being the case, Canola is the clear winner of the players in my book. It's gorgeous and plays back the formats I care about in full screen.

@Marcelo:

Something I just noticed -- when I convert videos using NITVC, the output MP4 cannot be played back on Canola/mPlayer but plays back fine on the built-in Media Player.

On the other hand, AVIs created in the N800 Video Convert software do not play back on Media Player but play fine in Canola/Mplayer

Is it possible for Canola to associate file types with specific media players, e.g. AVI files are played with mPlayer, and MP4 with Media Player

Ghoonk : yes we are aware of that (we talked to the mplayer guys and it's really problematic) so we changed that specific format to be handled by the media player for now. Once mplayer goes back to shape on this we will return.

And yes it's completely possible to configure all the associations, in the atabake,conf file if I'm not mistaken. MorpheuZ is the guy on the team dealing with that I think he already posted here how to edit it manually and we are improving it to fix this bugs.

Thanks for the info from you and mike!