Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Hey JoeD :)
don't need to thanks for the patient :) if we are providing a software that aims to make things easier, We need to be ready to help! :)))

Hope you like beta9!

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

JKhalid, did you try in a individual album?
can you send me the tags for the album name / artist name so we can test?

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Bug??

I just had an alarm go off, while canola was playing, and it froze canola. I dismissed the alarm, and canola would not respond to screen input.

Just thought you should know.

The new version is very snappy, running tuning right now to update covers. Excellent work to everyone on the team, and thank you all. I particularly love the on the move playlist, which is where I am heading next for more 'testing.' 8-)

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

That worked! Once I went to 3-album view, I could download individual album covers through options menu. Slower than downloading them all in one shot, but it works. Thanks!

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Ok, this may seem like a stupid "problem." I installed the newest version of canola, everything went fine. The menu items were quicker, BUT the scrolling of the list was much worse. Sometime the kinetic scrolling would jump around, sometimes not scroll at all, etc... This was the only problem (its a big problem, because it is hard to select songs as well), great job on this! But...

Ok this is the stupid part. I accidentally downloaded a large video to the internal memory (ROM) instead of the memory card! Now, I did not realize this, and this only gave me around 3 MB free space left on the device. When I ran Canola, it would not show any music, videos etc. This is kinda expected, because I had no space! Now comes the werid part. I thought, at that time, that maybe it was a temporary problem. So I quit Canola, and tried to restart. Nothing happened. So them I tried to run it from the terminal. No output, nothing, it just sat there, and then quit. After I removed the "rogue" video file, everything seems to work fine (except for the scrolling).

Thanks for the great program

Edit: Wait, does the list now have pressure support? Because I just tried it with a light touch, and it seemed to work much better.

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

I've gotten to play a little more today, and things are looking really good. The kinetic scrolling seems to be improved. I had been having issues with accidental clicks, but since I upgrading things seem to be going smoother (no accidental clicks).

I have hit one bug. While downloading podcasts, using my blackberry for internet, I had a call come in, and lost my connection. I never could get those downloads to restart/resume. I tried reconnecting to a couple of different networks (wireless) and reconnecting to my phone. I tried closing and restarting Canola. I tried shutting down the tablet. (I did grow up using MS-Dos & Windows) I ended up deleting the partially downloaded files in Canola and starting the downloads over. Which did work.

I had trouble with the 'Todays Feeds' page. I have a bunch of feeds, and it seems to be hanging while it is trying to fetch all of today's podcasts. It seems to be making progress for a while, the spinning circle has little pauses, which always has seemed to mean it is finding something to me. Then it starts spinning without stopping and the list never loads. I gave up after about 15 minutes. It doesn't take 15 minutes to load each one individually from the My Feeds page, and start my downloads. I wish the Todays Feeds page would show some sort of progress as it fetches new content. Either telling me which podcast it is fetching, and what it finds as it goes. Or maybe just a status 'Fetching 1 of 10', etc.

Maybe when I am done downloading all of my Podcasts for the day I will try the Youtube plugin.

Thanks,

Hal

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Khalid, this is really odd, because one by one is the same thing.. I think one file is breaking the search : /// if we could find it it would be nice to debug.

@thesandlord

did you really had that much problem with the scrolling? are you trying to scroll in the middle of the list and not on the bottom on in the corners? are you putting enough pressure to be recognize was a click and drag? Can you test with the stylus? I had some feedback from users that were complaining and they saw that it was lack of pressure. (of course it's damn easier to be our fault, as we are not satisfied with the list still)

Apart from the jump : it's more due to CPU hogging, if it's canola.. or you touchscreen is generating erractic mouse coordinates (is that calibrated) ?


The lack of memory is really like that. if there's no memory on the internal memory we are not able even to start it to give you an error : /

about the light touch : yes we indeed improve it to not have miss clicks anymore ( WOW now I'm relieved )
BR

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

I just updated, it's late so I may be missing something obvious, but where would I find the UPNP list?

It is VERY snappy, muito melhor!!

EDIT: Found it, didn't realize it was a plugin. I'll play tomorrow, boa noite.

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Did you use a particular application for the alarm? So we can reproduce the bug here?
Thanks for the compliments..! :)

Yes Hal, Adriano added some more "preventive" variables, and after some heavy user testing (first list was really error-free but then it was impossible to click :) ) we got this middle term, :)

About the feeds : I personally complained about that slowness, and also about the lack of feedback. I have a huge list of places where feedback is needed, and they will be added. But don't worry this my feeds page will have some improvements on next beta, trying to reach a usable point is the key for it now.

New youtube is coming soon :)

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Unfortunately, I'm still having video/audio playback issues with choppy video and audio. I've tried uninstalling Canola with the Canola uninstall utility several times in a row, then rebooting, then installing everything again. It appears as though I have mPlayer .26 official verson from the extras repository. I don't have any devel grade repositories installed (as far as I can tell) and I have no idea how to remove python-launcher, or where it's located.

I've had this issues since v8, but decided to wait until 9 to see if anything changed.I just ran through the sequence described in the forums for version 8 several times with v.9 and no luck. Any additional suggestions?

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

I'm using a 770 with OS2006. Just updated. Canola begins to load and then goes into an endless "updating media library". Only way to stop it is to use the taskbar tool that allows one to "kill" a program.

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

mplayer .27 should fare better afaik.

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Hey, just updated today and spent some time playing with it :)

It's amazing! I'm still amazed at how gorgeous canola is on the tablet :) The animations seem much smoother and the interface hangs less often. Especially the settings menus, way less tearing. Cover Arts as well seems a little smoother.

On the subject of cover arts, the Cover Arts plugin hung at 2% every time I tried it... I ran the standalone script and that worked.

On the whole I love it! Thanks for such an amazing program guys!

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

It's an issue with .26. Try if upgrading to mPlayer .27 helps. If not, downgrade to .24 (or what was the version before).

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Rhouge: there's a 5th Icon on the main menu : media servers : it's the upnp.

Well, what device are you using? and the most important, the viodes you try to play: do the play nicely in the default media player? or only in the standalone mplayer?

What music format are you using?

Maybe the problem isn't your installation:

a. you are using high quality vifdeos (that only standalone mplayer will play) and for now, until mplayer embedded mode is as good as standalone it will be choppy in higher quality. Solution for that; encode the videos with a lower resolution (it can be a good one, but not the best one supported by mplayer)

b. you are using also a music codec, only supported by mplayer with the same problem of too high quality.

So please try the following : get the basic n800 video and play it. does it play it choppy?

b. can you edit the atabake config file (please do a search in the forum) and set everything to OMS instead of mplayer to see if the still choppy.

Let me know your results..

It seems that we will not be able to support os2006 anymore. but you can still send us the debug message, running canola via xterm with -vvv as argument :

canola -vvv


Other thing : the only "supported" version for 770 will be the hacker edition.

Marcelo


I've had this issues since v8, but decided to wait until 9 to see if anything changed.I just ran through the sequence described in the forums for version 8 several times with v.9 and no luck. Any additional suggestions?

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

JOsiag :

Maybe one search is killing the device: can you do the following? uncheck some of the options : like folder and id3 and see if the hangs?

Also, if it doesn't, can you please go one by one on your covers (as it hangs on 2% may be on the first albums) to see what album gives you the trouble so you can send the files to us and we will be able to reproduce /fix the bug

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Hiya Marcelo...

I installed/updated Canola Beta9 last night after I got home. The application upgrade went fine, and I also updated a few other programs that showed on the list (Personal Menu, gPodder, etc). The Personal Menu application suggested a reboot, so I shut the tablet down and rebooted.

I started up Canola briefly to see what was new/changed, and was anxious to play with the new UPNP plugin, so I exited Canola and fired up the Application Manager again. Tried to download the plugin multiple times (6 or 7) and it kept "hanging" with zero bytes transferred. Finally, shut down the tablet and rebooted, then tried to download the plugin, and it downloaded immediately on the first try.

So, I suspect that Canola is leaving something around in memory when it shuts down (it's not shutting down as cleanly as it appears to be, apparently).

Since I did finally get the UPNP plugin installed, I'll comment on that in the other thread... ;)

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

It can be canola, it can be the other softwares you use :)
What we do after a canola shutdown : CanolaD keeps running for a couple of minutes, just to make sure if you closed accidentally or it crashed, you can re-start as fast as possible. After this 2 minutes I believe, the deamons are all killed and things should be clear. If you hadn't managed to install it I would have suggested that you wait 5 minutes. If it worked then.. it would be canola. If not then other software can also be blocking. But one point :

Canola NEVER interfers with the application installer. When you try to install something and it hangs, it's probably someone conflicting with app installer or the internet connection. We are really really reserved in using anything from the system. So we believe that it may be other component.

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

I've noticed a problem when I have more than a few videos in a folder (i.e. 4) there's no way that I can find to scroll down to select ones that aren't shown on the screen. I checked on the music list screen & I see the same issue, which makes sense 'cause it's probably the same code rendering the screen, just for different types of files. I can see a scrollbar appear for a second or two after the list is presented, but no matter what I do I can't activate it.

I think I found a reference to this issue in the beta 7 thread, but it's not clear to me that it is the same issue or not. Is there any work-around for this? tx

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Hi Grog :

so you actually dragged your finger (from the middle of the screen) towards the bottom and released (with enough pressure to generate events?)

And it didn';t work?

The scrollbar is not a scrollbar (as it barely has width for that) it's just a scrolling indicator.

I can say one thing: if scrolling was a bug, nobody would be able to use it :) because it's the basic interaction in the software : probably you have:

a. something blocking the events to get to canola
b. problematic screen (did you calibrated it)
c. been trying to use hardware (it doesn't work by now) it will work in the future thought.

If you have a 770 you may need to put MORE pressure, because the screen is not sensitive enough

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

No, what i actually didn't know to try is to drag my finger from the middle of the screen UP to the TOP, thereby dragging the file list up with it :). I hadn't realized that that was the way to do it. I should do some more browsing at the homepage before reporting bugs. Sorry about that :o.

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Thank you to the Canola team. Another good release - I'll keep this one short and sweet - one bug and one feature request for you to consider adding to the list:

1) I use the flat-black theme, not sure how much this is a problem with others, but: particularly in the sub-menus such as 'Audio', when you tap an icon it zooms in very slightly resulting in ugly jaggies/scaling artefacts, just before they zoom to the middle of the screen. Particulary noticeable on the CD icon for 'My music' and the casette tape for Podcasts. The problem exists throughout the interface but these are the best cases to illustrate (elsewhere the icons swish out of view quite fast so you don't see it unless you look for it, here there's a distinct pause when the icon scales just a small amount, leading to this probably unavoidable scaling issue, before it continues with the animation).

2) feature request: would it be possible to optionally or otherwise add the &fmt= trick to youtube URLs? I imagine the N8*0 hardware should be able to handle the slightly higher quality video? (though perhaps not - propose it's well worth a little test?) :)

Cheers! D.

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

@dsmudger:

1) this zooming is noticeable because they are 2 colors only. While the hardware doesn't support in good performance good and nice scaling / vector icons usage this will happen. Actually the only place where the icon scales is there and in the side icons (in the sub menu).

2) I don't think it can handle it yet :) but we can play with this in the next update :)

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

a. you are using high quality vifdeos (that only standalone mplayer will play) and for now, until mplayer embedded mode is as good as standalone it will be choppy in higher quality. Solution for that; encode the videos with a lower resolution (it can be a good one, but not the best one supported by mplayer)

-- They play fine in the default player (Media Player). It may be that they are encoded in too high a quality.--

So please try the following : get the basic n800 video and play it. does it play it choppy?

-- No it is not choppy--

b. can you edit the atabake config file (please do a search in the forum) and set everything to OMS instead of mplayer to see if the still choppy. Let me know your results..

1. I downloaded this file
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2008/emelfm2/

2. Using this application I found the atabake file at home/users/atabake.

3. I then used the emelfm2 edit tool to change the cofig file as instructed. This fixed the problem. THANKS! --!

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

1. Seems more responsive than v8.
2. Haven't run into the overdriven volume issue.
3. Some sort of tag issue with two albums. Canola would not recognize them as an album. I converted to MP3 and they were fine. No idea why. I even retagged them. I have lots of other wmas and they work fine.
4. Canola would see Orb server with UPNP feature, but wouldn't list any files.
5. TVersity server audio worked, but not video. I could see the files and the player would load up, but the server would crash. Mostly Xvid AVIs.

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Spice3D : I think mikel is doing some heavy tests with tversity to find out the best encodings settings for each media.

Can you send the wmas for us? We still also have some genre problems so any problematic file is welcome.

Also we are debugging a lot the upnp server support it will probably improve a lot in next updates.

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Hi Ogar! Happy this solved :
So this was really the problems, the video were a little bit to high for the "Embedded" Mplayer mode. : /

So I think our way is to really create a easy to setup "mplayer or default media player widget"

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

import error no module named ecore
anyway to fix this i seem not to be able to use any media playng application
ill run cleanup reboot and try again i have the install logs if they may help
no joy got this from xterm
$ canola

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "/usr/bin/canola", line 18, in ?

import ecore

ImportError: No module named ecore

~ $

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

joe: you have a incomplete installation.
Please do the following:

-install canola-cleanup
-run it
-remove all devel - non official repositories (or just disable them)
-install canola again

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

done all that...twice...gonna do a reboot in between for good measure only repos enabled are the one that install canola none of the media players are working...i already did a useless thread....well ill try it all again...ev thoug i have searched is there any known application that can cause this well this gorram thing is getting useless...broke the app manager...well thanks for the help...gotta go to work...ill tinker with it later...

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Marcelo: I emailed you an example file to your gmail email acct.

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Well joe, you for sure installed some really "alpha" app from out there that broke everything for you. In your case I would suggest a flash .

Then start over and avoid those really alpha application

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

i dont know what...maye flashing would make everthing better.....is there a way to list the installed apps...so i could well know ...which one it could be...maybe thru xterm...

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

I think dpkg -l lists the installed packages :)

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

wow...ill have to do some cutting and pasting...and give it a look....thanks again

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Hi there,

A bug in the podcast plugin from beta8 is still here with beta9.

I listen to a podcast of Democracy Now (http://www.democracynow.org/podcast.xml)

Every episode looks fine, except for thursday. Each week, Thursday's episode has a totally messed up title with strange characters.

Can you please have one of your engineers look at this?

Thanks

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Hi Genome, yes it was out, unfortunately the team is smaller, and restricted, so a lot of things were out. It's again back on the top list for podcast (this and the time that is taking to refresh the my feeds screen.

Sorry for that..

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Canola is a great piece of software, but ...

There are several things that forces me to use other media player although I'm still keeping an eye on the progress of Canola, just because it's so nice and amazingly easy to use.

One thing is that Canola sometimes (too often) shows various strange symbols instead of Cyrillic glyphs, but this problem is tracked on Canola bugtracker and I hope it will be earlier or later solved. I even plan to have a look at this since the component in question (canolad) seems open, so I can fix it myself and submit a patch.

The second problem is that Canola does not display the year of the album and the track number. I'm not even sure the tracks play in the correct order, as I don't see track numbers, and in many albums the order of the tracks plays a important role. Also, when selecting albums it's important to me to see the year of the album, since artist style ofter progresses with years, and sometimes I'd love to hear something from early creations, sometimes from later creations etc.

Of course, this is a matter of taste, so maybe it would be helpful at least to have some way for power users to change the display style for albums and track lists, a feature found in many players. Something like:

# The style for every line in the list of artists
cnl-set-prefs player artist-list-style "-= %a =-"
# The style for every line in album list
cnl-set-prefs player album-list-style "%y. %b"
# The style for every line in the track list of a single album
cnl-set-prefs player album-track-list-style "%n. %t"
# The style for every line in the global track list
cnl-set-prefs player global-track-list-style "%a - %t"
# The style for track information on the "Now Playing" screen
cnl-set-prefs player track-info-style "%n. %t\n%a\n%b"

The tags above are from EasyTag (%a - artist, %b - album, %n - track number, %t - track name, %y - year and so on) but of course this could use other format, for example %(year)s, %(artist)s and so on, Python-style.

And my latest problem with Canola is that the gap between tracks is sometimes too big. Not speaking of the fact that every self-respecting player nowadays supports a 'no-gap' playing mode, some albums contains tracks which have no pause between them, so introducing a 5-sec pause where there should be no pause at all is a kind of disappointing feature for music lovers. Perhaps this would require a change to atabake, so that it could start loading and preparing the music in advance (in a background thread), I don't know.

That's it for now. I hope you don't take this criticism as a offense, I really like Canola and I know I'm very picky about players, but I just have a grain of hope that some day Canola will be perfect enough so that I can forget about other players :-), and I hope telling my impressions/problems can help Canola become better.

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Hi Anpaza,

Well this was really a recurring issue, and we relied on the users sending us files to solve it, but we didn have too much of them. Also it seems that the port of python have problems still with some encondings, so we are looking even outside of canola how to solve it.

Anyhow we can use your help, if you have some files that display the symbols (those funny squares) and we will for sure do what we have been doing tireless: debug debug and try to fix it. A lot of users that complained, helped and we got good feedback from them after some updates.

The more info we add the more cluttered the UI gets, and thats (the cluttler) something that is the basic no-go of canola. Anyhow I do think your critic is valid, as it goes along with your way of consuming your media. But after a lots of users critics in several aspects of the albums organization or missing screens this is the first time I hear that. We had a bug in the beginning that indeed prevent the album to be played in the correct sequence even if it was correctly tagged the music. If the music is correct it will play. If it not, there not miracle or software in the world that will organize it correctly by track order. That more our way, if it can be transparent then it is. If not we think 2,3,4 and wait for more users complaings (this is the ranking system for our priorities) and for example the 2 things that are asked more related to album is : group the cover arts by artist, and gapless playback for those epic/albums. So, I doing my default action, I adding this to the queue, it will be designed anyways (as it is quite fast) just to see how it goes in the screens, and if more users request it will go up in the queue.

Here you got to the point :) we do wanted to support everyone, but it just not possible, and so a lot of other media players support it, so the power users were covered :) but the users that we target first are not, so that why keeping the simplicity (and not falling on the KDE style : let put settings for everything ) it very important for us. But as you said, it a matter of taste, and I can assure you if you knew everything that the power users asks, like "make it window mode - because I like to fast switch without pressing the button" and others, you would know what is like to have to keep the simplicity without making everyone hate the thing. In the end, unfortunately is a matter of choosing a target user group, and listen to them first and with higher priority and then implement more suggestions as those becomes universal and not from a niche/harder-to-please-with-ui-oriented-app user group.

Yeah, this is REALLY boring. We have done it all but the media framework + Dbus on the device is really a shortcoming for us. It really brings a "blocker". Atabake is really more like abstraction than everything else, and believed we done it all. The only thing that is closer to do it, is to port libXine, as even without atabake, simple commands to the default maemo media engine are already that delayed. With Xine, MorpheuZ was able to make the gapless playback, but with gstreamer (on the device ) no way. And I have personally confirmed with the Maintainers of gstreamer for the device within the multimedia team. Mplayer is even worse in this matter. So, we are out of luck :/ as the team is even smaller now, we need to pay our bills, so our "other" projects are now on full speed, reducing our ability of finishing porting, optimizing and give it a great shape to libXine. xmmp plugin (crossfade) also gives this ability, but we saw that this would be a burden, as it really xmmp specific.

Don worry :) We are not that sensitive :) - kidding - I think we are totally based and really commited to listen to good and bad things. And checking out the history it has been a lot of bad things said. We listen, we design and try to solve it inside our goal, and I think we are going quite well with the "amount" of development that we can dedicate to canola. I glad that I saw your critics and thought "ok, I relief we are on those already :)" because it shows that we gave the correct amount of attention to them (a lot) and as you can imagine, A LOT of users complained about the gap between songs, the gapless playback (not much about cross fading) and we have been researching ways since beta3.

Even like that, I also like to notice that, any other player on the maemo platform will suffer from several issues like us, and I deeply believe( of course I not comparing our project done by a team with solo developers) that in a lot of aspects we are light years ahead of them, or our infrastructure is really solid to build on top of. So for now is a matter of time, a matter of finally convincing the managers to let us release it open source, and then seeing it getting valuable contributions, even better debugging (it's already quite nice) and then see it improve and improve.

But being quite honest : I don believe we will ever be able to please everyone's wish, as this has been shown itself truly impossible. But we believe that we can be a solid choice for a lot of people, as we already know because we also receive a lot of thank you mails and so on. Those (and the critics) are really the fuel, for now, like I in my house to spend my personal hours also working on this project :)

Thanks for the feedback / critics .. sorry for the long replay.. I talk too much!

:)

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

I have one suggestion about the Cover Arts screen:

There are some albums which are not from only one artist - i talk about OSTs and generally VA albums (Various Artists). That's bad for most of the Canola screens since it sorts the albums by album name AND artist name, but for Cover Arts section its worse - especially with big several disk VA collections.

So my question is - can you make sorting by artist an option? I personally want to sort mine only on album name.