MediaBox Media Center
 

After several months of development, I have finally released version 0.90 of my MediaBox Media Center (http://mediabox.garage.maemo.org).
This version has been tested to work on the N800 with OS 2007. I have not tested it on OS 2008 yet. The 770 with OS 2006 should be supported in a future release.

Please tell me what you think of it. Some things (e.g. playlist support) are still missing, but I think it's a good start. Developing and using this application definitely brought new life to my old N800. :D

MediaBox aims to be an extremely finger-friendly and versatile media center for the Nokia internet tablets with a responsive UI and smooth kinetic scrolling. Media playback works with mplayer as backend, so it will be able to play many media formats, including Ogg Vorbis and Flash Video (.flv).

http://mediabox.garage.maemo.org/ssh...abox-video.png

Any suggestions for improvements or feature requests are welcome!

My plans for the near future are:
- FM Radio on the N800
- internet radio
- YouTube client
- playlist support
- improving the image viewer
- theming

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

Just tried it on OS2008. I get the following error: "No module named gnome.gconf"

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

Hmm, the same happens to me on OS 2006 on the 770. I'm gonna work around this eventually, but I still wonder why pymaemo for OS 2006 and OS 2008 doesn't include the gconf bindings...

Did they forget it, or did they move it? :confused:

Thanks for reporting this problem.

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

I think they rather changed something. Cause there is a package called "python2.5-gnome - Python bindings for GConf and GnomeVFS" but that is installed and doesn't help...

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

Nice UI!
What I'm missing is skipping in videos in fullscreen - maybe the use of the dpad for start/pause, skip?
But looks really smooth, congrats!
(using N800 - OS2007)

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

Skipping in fullscreen will come. Don't worry! :)

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

This is a known packaging bug in the pymaemo packages. It is caused by the missing file /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gnome/__init__.py and will be fixed soon. (according to the developers)

As a workaround you can do this as root in xterm:

touch /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gnome/__init__.py

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

@zeez, does it work on OS 2008 with this gconf-workaround now?

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

It started but then i added my media folders and it started canning my files and the whole screen went white. I'll wait a little longer - maybe it just takes a while ( i have about 50 videos and 500 mp3s on my device)

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

At least here it works on OS2008 on the N800, i am testing it out currently.

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

Slowly but surely... So i removed my mp3 folder from the one to be scanned and it works. (Seems to choke on either a certain file or the number of files - no idea). Anyway Looks very nice except i got no sound... I have sound when i use mplayer by itself but not within mediabox - also the video plays just fine.

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

Ok, from the first look:

I like the UI, very simple and clean, good colors, but it is difficult to navigate through larger Collections of Files (I have around 8GB of Music on the Device) as the selection on Music is limited to selecting Albums currently.

Another thing which maybe could be improved is that the startup time is not so good, it takes a while finish the "Searching Media Files" step, although i guess the filelist is allready cached somewhere, because the first time it it took way longer. :)

So as a first conclusion: It looks very promising, keep up the good work.

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

Same here, no sound from mplayer and it is not possible to switch the video to fullscreen as far as i can see.

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

Maybe the no sound issue is OS 2008-related. I will have to run tests on OS 2008. What happens when you attempt to switch the video to fullscreen? It might be another 2008 issue. But then, mplayer isn't quite ready for OS 2008 yet, as it seems.

The startup time is certainly a thing to improve. Lazy loading of thumbnail images would help, but the N800 (with OS 2007) was a bit too slow to make this beautiful. Hopefully it will get better with OS 2008.

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

I can get mediabox fullscreen in os2008, but there is no sound on the videos. Mplayer works fine (with sound) outside of mediabox in os2008 via the mplayer gui.

Apart from the lack of sound it seems like a very nice app!

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

I have just released version 0.90.1 (https://garage.maemo.org/frs/download.php/2733/mediabox_0.90.1-1_armel.deb), which addresses the gconf issue. The mplayer sound issue is under investigation.

The software now also sorta works on the Nokia 770 with OS 2006.

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

I'm getting the same behavior:

"ImportError: No module named gnome.gconf"

I went so far as purge v0.90 before installing 0.90.1. The _init_.py workaround didn't help. Any ideas?

thanks

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

Yeah I get the same thing, if starting with MediaBox from command line I get

Nokia-N800-44-4:~# MediaBox
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/MediaBox", line 3, in <module>
from mediabox.App import App
File "/usr/lib/mediabox/mediabox/App.py", line 1, in <module>
from MainWindow import MainWindow
File "/usr/lib/mediabox/mediabox/MainWindow.py", line 1, in <module>
import config
File "/usr/lib/mediabox/mediabox/config.py", line 6, in <module>
import gnome.gconf as gconf
ImportError: No module named gnome.gconf



But if you start the program with "MediaCenter" from the command line it starts as expected.

Cheers
Rip

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

I believe "MediaCenter" is UKMP. "MediaBox" is, well, MediaBox. There is an easy fix for this problem (emailed to me earlier today, actually, by someone else):

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

Yeah your right sorry :p I was looking at the symlink for MediaBox and didn't pay attention to where it was linking to I thought it said MediaCenter, and I have never used UKMP so I didn't know what it looked like :)


Cheers
Rip

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

Yes, MediaCenter is UKMP, and not MediaBox.

So, from what I read here, 0.90.1 did not fix the gconf issue on OS 2008?

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

nicely done; can't wait fir playlist support.... perhaps easier exit / return from full screen, too. os2008/n800 here, 2,000 ogg files....

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

bug: exit via os leaves mplayer running it seems, and mb won''t restart

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

Try the home button on your N8x0 for returning from fullscreen. The Esc button (directly beneath the cursor pad) quits the application.

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

ps - not even after killing mplayer.

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

Thanks for reporting. Exit via os is not handled yet. Actually exit via os closes just the window and leaves MediaBox running. This is a bug and will be fixed.

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

will look at this later / remnant files / with full keyboard informationhand

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

great work - glad also to see mplayer used -- low cpu load when playing any format esp ogg.

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

whoops, scratch that. I didn't realize there are two underscores on either side of 'init'.

So, v0.90.1 didn't fix the gconf error for me, but the workaround helped.

Also, I've got no sound when I play videos.

thanks for the cool app.

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

hmm, what's the extra icon? between music and photos....

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

This is FM radio. It was not ready for release 0.90 though. :)

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

I put OS 2008 on my N800 and fixed the mplayer sound issue. The new release 0.90.2 is available at http://mediabox.garage.maemo.org/download.html

Enjoy!

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

I have a problem where MediaBox hangs during "Looking for media files...". It seems that mplayer has a problem with creating thumbnails of some of my YouTube FLV videos.

Here is the output from ps:
Three "killall mplayer" wakes up MediaBox. After that everything seems to work but I get the hanging again if I restart MediaBox.

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

I am running OS2008 on an N800, and I do not see the FM radio icon on the bottom.

Any ideas what I could be missing?

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

I would assume it's still not ready yet :)

Cheers
Rip

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

Exactly. Maybe it'll be ready for 0.91. It's not far away. :)

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

Here's hoping that playlist support is in a soon to be coming release ... ;-)

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

great job pycage this is a very nice media app. one thing i'd add is to seperate the paths in the settings for movies, pictures, etc. so that i don't see the album cover with my photos.

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

I cannot install Mediabox. The appmanager gives me the following error:
osso-application-installer 4.46, UI version 2
/usr/bin/dpkg-deb -f '/home/user/MyDocs/.documents/mediabox_0.90.2-1_armel.deb'
/usr/bin/dpkg --install '/home/user/MyDocs/.documents/mediabox_0.90.2-1_armel.deb'
(Reading database ... 14345 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking mediabox (from .../mediabox_0.90.2-1_armel.deb) ...
dpkg: error processing /home/user/MyDocs/.documents/mediabox_0.90.2-1_armel.deb (--install):
corrupted filesystem tarfile - corrupted package archive
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
/home/user/MyDocs/.documents/mediabox_0.90.2-1_armel.deb
/usr/bin/dpkg --purge `/usr/bin/dpkg-deb -f '/home/user/MyDocs/.documents/mediabox_0.90.2-1_armel.deb' Package`
dpkg - warning: ignoring request to remove mediabox which isn't installed.

I get the same error when i download and install directly from the garage.
Freshly flased n800 with latest OS2007, mplayer 1.0rc1 and python 2.5 runtime 0.4-13

Ton.

Re: MediaBox Media Center V 0.90
 

This looks like a broken download. Try downloading again, maybe using another computer. It could also be that the problem was on the server side (as we all know, garage.maemo.org isn't known for stability...). In that case, try downloading again later.