Mediabox or Mplayer?

[koolpappyp]

I know this may seem redundant, but I looked at all the threads on these two media players and to say the least the threads quickly became convoluted for me.:confused: As a Newbie, which would be the best and easiest to use? They all seem to have posted attributes and negatives, but from a users point of view, which one do you recommend based upon current experience? I am looking for straightforward use of music and videos. All I want to do is download the best one and move on and enjoy both music and video (Movies) on my N800. I have OS2008 installed. This should be a lot easier than I'm apparently making it, but I would like advice.:)

Thanks in advance.

[aflegg]

MediaBox is a pretty front-end to mplayer.

Kagu and UKMP are both very pretty front-ends to mplayer.

Canola 2 is a very very pretty (but still very beta) front-end to the built-in media playback or mplayer.

[koolpappyp]

Thank you very much. Things are now making sense to me. It appears that mplayer is the underlying app for all but Canola, if I understand what you said? Load mplayer first and choose the front end that suits me. Or wait for Canola 2 official release.
Thanks again, your post has been very helpful.

[Laughing Man]

If you install whatever front end it usually comes with mplayer built in. Or it uses the framework so you won't have to load it separately.

[koolpappyp]

Thank you, now I see what what I need to do.

Again, I appreciate your posst.

[munky261]

canola 2 may be beta , but there are no issues with me for using it and im picky as hell when it comes to media players... i strongly reccomend it.

[koolpappyp]

Well, That's good enough for me. I may wait to see if there are any other followup posts, but I think I take your recommendation.

Thanks.

BTW, I think the N800 is great, it serves all my mobile needs. I travel to Europe quite a bit and don't like lugging my laptop everywhere, so this more than fits the bill. Now if only I could print from it directly to a usb printer, all would be sunshine.

[aflegg]

The only real usability issues with the Canola 2 beta for me are:


Album art and video thumbnailing are impossible to use for an inexperienced user; and even for experienced users the results are sub-optimal IME.
No pre-configuration for the known media directories: /media/mmc2/Video, /home/user/MyDocs/{.sounds,.images,.videos} - this means a new user won't see any media found at all, with no explanation.
The icons in the green theme are all round, and have no distinct outline making them very hard to distinguish intuitively. The graphite theme gets this right.

[koolpappyp]

Hummmm. Looks as if Canola 2 is departing from my KISS philosophy.;)
I'll have to rethink my options.:confused:

thanks for your post.

[munky261]

album art works perfect for me , i wrote a guide on how to do it correctlyif youd like it just pm me with your email addy.

[Laughing Man]

It's not that bad, you just have to set the settings for it to watch the internal and/or external SD cards. Which is just an eye for watch (but that's confusing to most people I suspect).

Album Art wise yeah it's a pain, I use Kagu and another program for a media center though (yeah I have three different media centers installed if you include the Canola beta lol). One of those offers automatic fetching of album work.

As for the icons, I've never had a problem hitting them. They're nicely finger sized. However, I like the graphite theme but the back button (or escape button..or whatever you wanna call it) doesn't work for me. :(

[scottyb159]

I am new to all of this. I tried a few videos with each last night. The built in player was the only one that worked without a problem when I used the Nokia converter. Canola looks really nice but was choppy with the same video

[koolpappyp]

Ei yi yi!!!!!:confused:

album art works perfect for me , i wrote a guide on how to do it correctlyif youd like it just pm me with your email addy.

Munky261: Thanks, I'll take you up on your offer if I go in that direction.
The only real usability issues with the Canola 2 beta for me are:

Album art and video thumbnailing are impossible to use for an inexperienced user; and even for experienced users the results are sub-optimal IME.
No pre-configuration for the known media directories: /media/mmc2/Video, /home/user/MyDocs/{.sounds,.images,.videos} - this means a new user won't see any media found at all, with no explanation.
The icons in the green theme are all round, and have no distinct outline making them very hard to distinguish intuitively. The graphite theme gets this right.
Seems like the final release of Canola 2 would hopefully resolve these "issues"?

All these posts have benn increadibley helpful. Wish the decision was as easy.:) No one seems inamored with Mediabox, humm.

Thanks to all!! BTW, how do you post a thanks, just can't seem to find it.

[aflegg]

I like Mediabox; I'm just tending to use the built-in media player more (have a few MP4 files I've downloaded which Media Player likes more than mplayer, IIRC).

Mediabox certainly has the best implementation of kinetic scrolling, although is a little unstable (seems much more stable when run from a command line, <geek>so this is probably a trivial osso_initialise bug</geek>).

Mediabox's semi-transparent clock is also very stylish.

I wish more respected folders for videos, rather than putting them all in one big long list. I don't like episodes of Thomas & Friends getting in the way of Doctor Who ;-)

[koolpappyp]

Thanks.
Mediabox uses mplayer as it's core as I think I understand. So I think what you are saying is Media Player for some videos and Mediabox for others. Sort of trial and error to get the right mix and match.

What puzzles me somewhat is that one member said they used Canola 2 for some videos and got jumpy video and using Media Player gave better results. But doesn't Canola use Media Player as its core? So why any difference?

So silly me thought this was going to be easy!!!!!!

Maybe in future releases the Mediabox stability and MP4 issues will be addressed.

And to think, all I wanted to do is download the consensus best player, a Newbie hope on my part.

These posts have been very illuminating, hopefully it will eventually lead to me actually installing something and "ta ta", USE IT!!

[koolpappyp]

I just loaded Canola 2 and Mediabox. Canola seems to worl well, mplayer works well, but mediabox says it's loading, then nothing, Just stays at the boot screen. Everything on the N800 still works but no Mediabox. Whazzzzzzzzzzzupppppp?:confused:

Canola takes some fooling around to get to the audio/video, but I eventually figured most of it out to satisfy me that it was very usable.

Mplayer works as a standalone too.

Well, there you are wanted to know the bst media player and end up loading three of them and one diodn't work.

now to play with them and see which one performs best for me.

Thanks for the help.:D

[pycage]

Mediabox certainly has the best implementation of kinetic scrolling, although is a little unstable (seems much more stable when run from a command line, <geek>so this is probably a trivial osso_initialise bug</geek>).

I'd like to hear more about this instability issue when not running from command line.

I run MediaBox in both ways (release versions launched from the app menu, development versions launched via Terminal from SD card) and haven't noticed any difference in stability so far.

[aflegg]

I'd like to hear more about this instability issue when not running from command line.

I run MediaBox in both ways (release versions launched from the app menu, development versions launched via Terminal from SD card) and haven't noticed any difference in stability so far.

Sorry, I thought I'd reported it.

Running current OS 2008 on an N810. When run from the application menu, it usually quits after a couple of minutes. No "Loading MediaBox..." infoprint is shown, which is usually an indicator that the system hasn't received the expected DBUS registration, so kills the app. It doesn't seem to be dependent on what I'm doing, e.g. switch to the clock screen - hoping to use it as a clock at night, and wait. I thought it was connected to screen dimming (timeout is set to 2 mins), but it's not.

The same quit doesn't occur when run from the command line.

[pycage]

Sorry, I thought I'd reported it.

Running current OS 2008 on an N810. When run from the application menu, it usually quits after a couple of minutes. No "Loading MediaBox..." infoprint is shown, which is usually an indicator that the system hasn't received the expected DBUS registration, so kills the app. It doesn't seem to be dependent on what I'm doing, e.g. switch to the clock screen - hoping to use it as a clock at night, and wait. I thought it was connected to screen dimming (timeout is set to 2 mins), but it's not.

The same quit doesn't occur when run from the command line.

Thanks.
Could you please run the following in a terminal and tell me if there are errors:
python -c "import osso"
python -c "import hildon"

If one of these imports fail, then MediaBox thinks it runs on a standard desktop and does not initialize OSSO. This might cause your problem.

[aflegg]

python -c "import osso"

As you suspected, the OSSO bindings aren't installed. Sounds like a "Depends:" bug?

BTW, any plans to speed up the "Looking for media files" using some kind of cache (without the addition of another media scanning tool)? Are last modified dates on directories reliable enough?

Thanks for your help.

Cheers,

Andrew

[dubwise]

Well, there you are wanted to know the bst media player and end up loading three of them and one diodn't work.

now to play with them and see which one performs best for me.

Now you've got the idea. Enjoy.

[pycage]

Thanks for checking the import commands.

As you suspected, the OSSO bindings aren't installed. Sounds like a "Depends:" bug?
Yeah, definitely. The package depends on python2.5 but should instead depend on python2.5-runtime. I'm going to fix this with the next release.

BTW, any plans to speed up the "Looking for media files" using some kind of cache (without the addition of another media scanning tool)? Are last modified dates on directories reliable enough?
The next release will come with a more intelligent mediascanner and deferred assembling of thumbnails. This results in a great speed-up for scanning and startup in general.

Last modified dates on directories are not reliable in my opinion, because they don't tell you anything about modifications in subdirectories. So there are basically two options left for scanning:

(1) scanning all media folders for new/changed stuff
(2) watching media folders for changes

MediaBox does (1) because (2) would impose additional package dependencies and only works while the program is watching. (1) is pretty fast for just running through the directory trees, so I don't think there's a need to change this. But maybe (1) can be accompanied with (2), where inotify is available. This sounds like an interesting enhancement.