VLC for Fremantle?
 

Hi all,

I see by this videolan forum thread that VLC is coming to Fremantle. I would like to ask any of the developers to begin uploading what they have to extras-devel for testing.

If anyone who knows the developers, can you ping them and ask them to help here?

Even if there's no GUI yet, it would be great to have the most famous media players in the repositories.

Thanks!

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

I tried to build that but atleast version 1.0 didnt work out...some libraries in Fremantle are too old for VLC as usual :)

Maybe someone has a better luck :)

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

sampppa: did you try the "base port" (no UI) from Rémi Denis-Courmont that you can find here?

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

Aha! Rémi just posted some .debs to try out on his website.

From the thread I linked to above:

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

It might require even more space than mplayer :)

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

No kidding! :eek:

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

Anyone with a screenshot of VLC?

TIA.

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

Well, since there is no GUI, all you'd see is the video you're playing... Not very useful.

EDIT: And it would have to be a photograph, rather than a screenshot, because video doesn't seem to be captured by screenshot apps.

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

Good news:

VLC for Maemo 5 plays videos more smoothly than mplayer. The optimizations must be paying off.

More good news:

It is automatically put into /opt, leaving room in your base filesystem for more apps.

The bad news is, of course, that it doesn't have screen blanking, nor does it have a GUI yet. The keypresses don't work right.

But for playing difficult-to-play videos, it works great. If you don't mind tapping the screen every so often. I haven't tested streaming yet. But that should be seriously cool...

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

Urgh, I can only hope MPlayer will get more optimizations. If not, I don't care since not using VLC is a matter of principle. :)

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

what principle?

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

My own principle.

for reference:

http://joppu.servut.us/HOW_TO_CCCP.htm

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

That rant, from what I can pick out from between the inside jokes and technical jargon, seems to be about bad encoding practices among video pirates. The player isn't to blame for the artifacts created by bad encoding.

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

It's about the fact that (earlier versions of, pre 0.9) VLC were incapable of showing styled subtitles and the codec support for MPEG-4 codecs like h.264 were horrid. Since a lot of foolish people used VLC instead of farly superior codecs or media players, encoders were forced to use inferior subtitling and older less efficient codecs with worse compression ratio that lead to lower bitrates and quality decrease. VLC is also noterious for laggy playback, pixelating artefacts when skipping frames and blurry postprocessing

I don't know if they have fixed any of this yet, but it seems that they have made some groundbreaking new features like instant pause in the latest 1.0 release, who could have dreamed of that!?

But I'm not touching VLC again anytime soon.

[/rant]

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

Now I just have to figure out how to hook up my DVD without USB host mode.

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

For future reference...

This will display the N900 back camera's output on the screen:

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

Mplayer and VLC use the same decoders from ffmpeg, so which one is faster is the one that's newer usually, give or take a few weeks.

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

shadowjk: true enough, but there definitely seems to be some special ffmpeg optimization for the N900 being done by Rémi Denis-Courmont, the guy getting the VLC core ready for Maemo 5.

Talking about Rémi Denis-Courmont, he's released another version of VLC. Even more optimised and now the key presses work.

He's looking for people to build a Maemo UI for VLC, however....

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

GUI mockup:
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/805039/img/vlcguimockup.png
(I'm gonna hate myself for this)

Edit:

Whoops, forgot the task switcher...

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

Does this Rémi Denis-Courmont have plans to put VLC in the extras?
Otherwise people wont find his port....

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

I doubt that the whole thing would build from within the official Maemo infrastructure. The VLC build system requires network access to fetch external sources. This is fixable, but it needs tedious work.

On top of that, VLC needs python-xcbgen. In the current Fremantle SDK, python-xcbgen is only available as source code and needs to be built and installed manually. So it's impossible to fill the VLC build-dependencies as is with the public Fremantle SDK. Again, this could be worked around, but it takes time.

Last and most importantly, I have to question the value of submitting to Extras a package that does not have a user interface. You can really only use it from the OSSO terminal at the moment. The old N8x0 Hildon UI partially works, but it's ugly, buggy, limited and unfriendly. The normal Qt4 somehow get stuck during the startup. This seems like a bug in the Qt4 run-time. Due to this bug, I do not know how usable the normal VLC Qt4 UI would be on N900.

It's a fairly general problem with VLC that it's ported to a bunch of portable systems (iPAQ, QNX, WinCE were done before by other people), but nobody ever bothers to write a user interface:( I'm sorry but I have limited time and no expertise in UI design myself.

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

I got the Qt4 UI to work now. But the usability is bad and it makes VLC slow :( I will see what I can do. But generally, until one of the VLC Qt UI developer gets his hands off an N900, I think this is a bit stuck:confused:

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

Hello,
I made a mockup of how VLC could look on the N900, its just half an hour in photoshop and googling

Playing a Movie:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k263/Sigudian/1.jpg
Tapping the Screen:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k263/Sigudian/2.jpg
Tap the menu button:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k263/Sigudian/3.jpg

The menu items i used is just copypasta from the Mac version (except, the "Show in Finder" item)..


This is how i hope VLC will look, just with the user interface a bit optimized, Like the same font everywhere and my menu button was just an edit of the task switcher button. Oh and I forgot a way to exit the app without the task switcher.

One thing to note, is that my N900 will not arrive to my house before next week, so ive only seen screenshots and videos of the gui online, if im making another mockup its using the freemantle sdk of course :)

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

Any new developments in this?

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

Looks nice. Lets hope that someone implements that :)

Some notations in my point of view and I understand that you just made it quickly :)

- Play/stop bar should popup from bottom without spacing.
- Seekbar and volumebar are too small for fingers also full screen button
- Time left and running time.
- Where is close button?

It´s nice mockup!

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

Sorry, I did it before i actually got my device...
though I would do it slightly different now.
Ill make another one when I have some spare time :)

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

how is this coming along

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

Latest changelog dated 27/5/2010.

Maemo port:
* Multiple improvements for N900 compliance and efficiency
* Support for HW accelerated video decoding on N900
* Improvements to the maemo/hildon interface

Full changelog and source are here:
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/1.1.0-RC.html

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

What does this exactly mean??

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

It means this: http://www.remlab.net/files/vlc/fremantle/ if you don't know how to install it you probably don't want to install it. You have been warned.

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

Haha, finally we are getting there... nice!

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

Is here anyone who have tried it ?

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

Great news! It does handle much higher bitrate videos than software-only mplayer. It is still buggy though.

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

looks nice but where is the "hildon interface" ?
vlc -l doesn't show anything...

Re: VLC for Fremantle?
 

Yea doesn't really seem to be faster then the gstreamer player for playing a video at least. But thats pretty much on the list of known bugs.