marxian | # 61 | 2011-10-28, 11:51 | Report

It wouldn't even be necessary to have a plugin. I could simply check if ffmpeg is installed, and enabled an extra option in the menu. However, it would not make any difference how the option is enabled. The application can still be pulled from the store if someone important enough objects to the content. Worse than that, I could end up getting a Cease & Desist from the lawyers. I already run that risk by allowing YouTube downloads, but I do it because it is for the purpose of convenience and reduced data usage, rather than copyright infringement. Enabling what is obviously a music piracy feature simply increases that risk to a level that I don't wish to go to. There's a big difference between having an application in the community repositories and having it in a commercial application store.

afaq | # 62 | 2011-10-28, 12:33 | Report

Thank you for the detailed response.

I have rebooted the device (had not done so since day 1 and after installing tens of apps thought it was best). Most of the issues I mentioned above i have not been able to reproduce. I did not want to leave a review on the Nokia Store as I agree with most of what you have said above, some issues around speed are from youtube end and the others could be my device.

I am using the app now and the downloads are must faster. Happy with this. The App however has started to crash again. I downloaded a video and it worked but the video will not play or appear in in the archive or video gallery. This might have caused the crash as I tried to open it from the Transfer UI several times.
The URL to the video is
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhNNkZ9YK8M

Another exception I find is that some videos download and play partially. When trying to skip ahead using the progress bar I get this message:
"cannot play video because its in the wrong format"

Hopefully the updated version you have submitted solves these issues.

Btw great app on the whole.

marxian | # 63 | 2011-10-28, 13:28 | Report

I downloaded that video (using the 360p quality setting) and I was able to play it in the stock video player by launching it from the Transfer UI. However, it would not play in cuteTube. GStreamer reports the following error:



You can see that there are some characters (square brackets) that are URL encoded.

I renamed the file (removing the square brackets) and it worked fine. The two possible fixes are to replace these characters when downloading the file, or to decode the characters when passing the URL to the video player (this would be my preferred option, but I need to test it first). I'm not sure why it would work on the stock player, but not when using the QML Video component (stock player uses MeeGo Touch Framework for the UI, but I think it still uses the same backend). There must be a difference in behaviour (perhaps the stock player decodes the URL, or alternatively does not URL encode it). I expected that any legal filename would be acceptable to GStreamer.

Can you tell me which quality setting you are using for downloads? I haven't ever experienced that. It sounds like the video was only partially downloaded. If that happens, it should mark the download as 'Failed'. I handle all cases where the download operation is completed successfully or the QNetworkReply returns an error. Perhaps there are some cases where the download is incomplete, but the QNetworkReply does not return an error.

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Last edited by marxian; 2011-10-28 at 13:32.

shallimus | # 64 | 2011-10-28, 18:05 | Report

Marxian - great apps! Bought both CuteTube and MusiKloud.

For CuteTube, one feature that was great in the N900 version is the 'paste URL into CuteTube to go to video' functionality (or is it already in the N9 version and I didn't look hard enough?)

Also: the search results in CuteTube (both N9 & N900) are quite different to YouTube web client. Has this been discussed elsewhere, and is there a way to get the same results as on the website?

This is a sensible position to maintain IMO.

Besides, if you're keen to have that functionality, it should be easy to use some dirt-simple script with ffmpeg to strip out just the sound from the downloaded video. Maybe a few more steps for the user, but it protects Marxian and protects CuteTube.

Also, buying music isn't so hard, at least for me. Most of the music I like is released on smaller indie labels who offer cheap DRM-free MP3s...

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Last edited by shallimus; 2011-10-28 at 18:08.

tissot | # 65 | 2011-10-28, 18:21 | Report

I believe the update isn't out in Nokia Store yet, right?

marxian | # 66 | 2011-10-29, 01:23 | Report

An update on recent bug reports:

1. There is an issue with playing downloaded tracks with filepaths that contain certain characters. This is due the filepaths being URL encoded by the DocumentGalleryModel. GStreamer doesn't like the URL encoded filepath. I have fixed this by decoding the filepath before passing it to the video player. I'll test for robustness over the weekend.

2. When playing a video (not from the archive), an infinite loop is executed if there are downloads in the queue (the application checks if the currently playing video is in the download queue, and gets stuck in an infinite while loop ). In some cases this will lead to lockup of the main thread, resulting in the 'Application not responding' message. This is now fixed.

marxian | # 67 | 2011-10-29, 01:40 | Report

The feature is there. If you paste the URL into the search bar, and press 'Search' it should take you straight to the video. The next release also has clipboard monitoring, so if the application is running, you simply copy a URL to the clipboard and cuteTube will retrieve the video and add it to your playback and/or download queue.

The search results depend upon how the application presents the query to the API. In my case, if the query is 'search test', I use the following:

I more fuzzy approach would be

but that would probably return a lot of false positives.

I don't know how the API processes the search query, nor do I know what algorithm the YouTube server uses for searches performed via the website. I suspect that it is more finely tuned than searching via the API. There is probably some filtering out of common words. It may even take into account videos that you have previously watched and so on.

marxian | # 68 | 2011-10-29, 01:45 | Report

It's still awaiting QA approval, but I'm probably going to submit another update this weekend, as the above mentioned bugs are showstoppers, so I need to have the fixes out ASAP, rather than wait until the current update passes QA. This means that the update will be delayed, as the QA process will need to be restarted.

shallimus | # 69 | 2011-10-29, 02:03 | Report

Outstanding awesome work, and thank you for being so responsive.

<OT>
I'm hoping to start making some simple apps for N9/Harmattan, but I ran into some issues while trying to take my baby steps. The speed with which you got cuteTube developed for N9 made my head spin, so I'm hoping I'm capable of learning to be productive in Qt Creator. I did get a Hello World done (what an accomplishment) and started defining some grids and stuff (wahey!)
</Ot>

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Last edited by shallimus; 2011-10-29 at 02:06.

marxian | # 70 | 2011-10-29, 02:38 | Report

Thanks. Feel free to ask any questions about Qt, QML or Qt Components. I just saw your issue with Qt Designer. That's one area I know nothing about, because I always hand-code my QML in Qt Creator. I hate WYSIWYG. I tried the designer for about 5 seconds before I became frustrated with it.