Recently I'm using MediaBox-96.3 and I've some questions about it.

1) What should I do to make the songs which are saved in the internal memory of IT to get categorized by Albums and Artists in MediaBox? Other media player does this automatically but MediaBox doesn't seem to do it automatically. I put all the respected media files under respected folder and this way I could make it appear in the list 'By Folder' but I just don't have any idea how I can do the same for 'By Album' and 'By Artist' category though album and artist names are defined in its properties.

2) At first, I thought it was just canola having problem to play the video file as good as when it is directly played from mplayer but MediaBox seems to have the same problem. Slow scenes are alright but some fast scenes stutters and are unwatchable.

3) Few days ago I added repo Diablo extras-devel in the app manager and was excited to see the update for MediaBox with 96.4. I quickly installed it but was even more disappointed with the video playback. Screen stuttering is gone but the picture quality is degraded so much so that everything looks blurred and unwatchable. I have one animated movie which MediaBox was playing alright although there were shadows of the characters and looked like color is splattered everywhere in the screen but with the update just vertical lines appear with the sound. Why is this happening with the update and why is it in extras-devel repo?

Lack of good video playback from all the players (Canola, MediaBox) I've tried, I'm sticking to MPlayer which is, I know, awkward as there is so fancy Media players out there and I don't want to use it this way either and also converting movies takes too long to bother plus the quality degrades as well.

There are disadvantages of automatically scanning every media that gets inserted into the tablet. That's why MediaBox only scans what you tell it to scan. In the folder browser, when you open a folder, the topmost item (the one that shows the name of the folder) has a button which will show you two options. The [+] option means "add to library" and adds this particular folder (and all its subfolders) to your media library. MediaBox only scans the folders that are in the library.

Getting smooth and good playback with mplayer is indeed tricky.

(a) distorted colors: I have seen these with some FLV videos. These videos play fine when mplayer is run directly, but have distorted colors when played in Canola or MediaBox. This is a bug in mplayer's rendering. When mplayer runs directly, it defaults to directly overlaying the video onto the framebuffer. But with MediaBox and Canola, mplayer is run with xv-rendering (because direct FB overlay messes up with the rendering of the user interface). Xv-rendering shows this color distortion bug. This seems to be very rare, though. So far I've only seen two FLV videos with this problem.

(b) blurred output: this happens when mplayer downscales a hi-res video. Usually hi-res videos stutter terribly on the tablet, unless you tell mplayer to scale it down. MediaBox 0.96.4 uses this feature now, so some terribly stuttering videos might now play, but at the cost of some bluriness.

(c) stuttering: the tablet is not fast enough to decode the video in real time. mplayer on maemo is also buggy with some internal timings, so some videos that could play fine are played with stuttering. MediaBox 0.96.4 uses a workaround to help mplayer get its timings right.

(d) vertical lines, dots, weird output: This happens when mplayer attempts to scale down a hi-res FLV video for playing it smoothly. Downscaling in mplayer doesn't work with FLV and Quicktime right now.

Running mplayer by itself really produces the best results. I'm really interested to find out why. FB overlay vs Xv cannot really be the sole reason, IMHO.


The Canola guys have several times stated that they try to port the Xine media player backend to maemo. Maybe this would help with some issues, but so far, I haven't seen any progress or announcement there.
MediaBox is ready for Xine (support has been implemented and works fine on standard Linux), but Xine for maemo is not available yet...

I should also mention that switching to fullscreen mode when playing a video in MediaBox can make playback a bit smoother.

Thanks pycage, that completely answered all my questions and I'm very satisfied as well. Now I look forward they come up with the solution soon some way or the other.

By the way, the animated movie I'm trying to play is AVI file with the following properties:

Video Stream:
930 Kbps, 700*292(2.35), at 23.976 fps, MPEG-4 Visual (DivX 5)

Audio Stream:
128 Kbps, 48.0 KHz, 2 channels, MPEG Audio (MP3) (Version 1) (Layer 3)

Thanks..