Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

THE MEDIA PLAYER IS CRAP. i logged a thread for this some time ago. it takes forever to organise the videos before you can play them, and the same goes for the music player. WHERE IS THE INDEXING???? this is bad

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

I was not talking about the album art. I have almost fixed the problem of some tracks having missing album art and once I do I will start a thread saying everything that needs to be done to ensure every single album art displays as it should. Seems there are about five steps guaranteed to make it work and I am on stage four of five. Very painful process and it shouldn't really be so.

What I was talking about was the artist tags. For this I have found no fix. Has nothing to do with itunes. As I said I have used Windows Media Player, Media Monkey, Winamp and MP3 tag. None have fixed the problem. Not a problem with itunes just a problem with the N900. Have not had the problem with any other mp3 player and I am sure it would not even be a problem on Nokia N97, 5800 or X6.

If you know the solution I would be very very glad to send you a few of the tracks for you to work on and tell me how to get the device to show the correct artist tags.

As for suggesting a £40 mp3 player should be a better mp3 player than a £500 N900 I think is ridiculous. Was a valid argument years ago but certainly not in 2010. Any company holding that attitude or taking that approach in 2010 is going to lose some serious market share. Many don't want to carry around separate devices especially if one is as bulky as the N900. Especially since many will always have to carry a DS for which there is absolutely no substitute. So if your phone doesn't do mp3 playback properly you may have to carry at least three devices.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

i havent had any issues with the media player YET, probably because i havent had a good glance at it... but people on here with a N900 really need to get a grip.. If the media player sucks, it sucks, end of..

Come on, u all know it that this thing is supposed to have a better media player. ur just being ignorant because U own this device and cannot see anyone say something bad about it...

Everyone brags about open-source... is this just for namesake?? why nobody bloody get on and make one media player themselves?? its supposed to be open-source. u got the code etc...

IF ONLY this phone drew the attention of the guys at xda devs.. things wouldve been different..... if anyone has some spare time from ur N900, go to the xda developers and see how that forum is....

LOOK FOR A SOLUTION RATHER THAN SAYING YOUR DEVICE IS PERFECT

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

Actually, that is true to some extent, at least that would put the issue of a media player on the community/3rd party developers. Really the issue is what does Nokia consider a "portable computing device" to entail exactly. The attitude of a lot of people here seems to be that mobile xterm is all anyone would need in a "portable computing device".

The media player isn't the only lackluster app. Email is pretty awful as well. And while that doesn't bother me too much, I wouldn't think of making excuses for how sh**y the email app is. It's subpar, end of story. It makes sense to assume that since Nokia included these applications that "portable computing" would include media playback, email/PIM, web. NOT just a mobile xterm.

I don't need to do a benchmark test because audio skipping/stuttering is obvious. This has improved a lot in PR1.1 and I'm not super concerned about it, but as I said above I'm not going to make bull***t excuses about how the N900 isn't a PMP. I think some of the current issues have more to do with the underlying frameworks and issues with video playback and large media libraries.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

Now to get this thread back on track, here are some links to relevant bug reports, please go vote, contribute if necessary, search or file new reports if you have an issue:

bug 7190 - music stutters during multitasking

Bug 6823 - media player won't play any video files now (.avi) divx / xvid

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

I haven't received my n900 yet, but, I'd still like to comment.

I use my N96, and have used my past N78's (lol, multiple N78's) to listen to music while texting, playing a game, or browsing the web. Now, with the N900 having 32gb of memory, and it being multitasking mobile PC, I expect it to do a semi-decent job of playing music. A decent dedicated music player will probably always be better, but some of these issues sound ridiculous.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

I'm sure this will be completely ignored, but...here goes anyway....

The Media player is built atop many pieces of software, that fluidly integrate together.

The most critical of these is the PulseAudio daemon. If you CLAIM to want to understand this device, go to their project site, and read up on it.

There has been considerable progress in PulseAudio's design since its inception a few short years ago, but the majority of PulseAudio's development has been on x86 and desktop targets, which is very different from the ARM stuff being targeted here.

It will get better, but as with all things open source, it takes time and dedicated programmer time. This is not Nokia's fault, and you should NOT be pointing the finger at them.

I am very dismayed and DISGUSTED at the sheer arrogance and air of self-entitlement of the most vocal detractors on this forum, yes...you paid for this device...the same as you paid for your desktop....

but unlike most "phones" ... this device is built atop a highly extensible stack, of which the vast majority of it is NOT developed by Nokia, and is developed in an open forum. Nokia is doing something radically different here, and it WILL pay off, as developers from the surrounding projects such as PulseAudio, gstreamer (the modular processing framework that connects this all together), etc mature.

so please guys,

JUST CHILL, you have three options:

(1) file bug reports with Nokia or the surrounding projects.
(2) join a project and contribute code
(3) STFU and WAIT PATIENTLY.

-Thom

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

Why would you think this would be ignored? This is exactly what I wanted to know. You could have left out the world-weary, angry programmer ********, but the reply contains good info. Thanks.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

Useful info except that I have already parted with my $625 so waiting is not an easy thing to ask. If Nokia only collected my full money when everything was working as well as it is claimed on this website that it will then I would not be complaining.

Can I also add another problem with the media player on my device which I would be glad if someone could tell me how to solve. Tracker (whatever that is) does not work well at all on mine. For example I just switched on my device go to media player and it shows 4403 songs. I go into artist view and it shows no artist. I go into all albums and it shows no albums. I go into all genres and it shows no genres. I think if I do the kill tracker command it should fix the problem but this really should not be the case in a device sold to the general public.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

Right, except most of the issues with the media player on this device have to do with the parts that are NOT opensource (ie, Nokia's closed-source media player itself). Thus, all we CAN do is vote on bug reports (lol..) or "wait patiently".


A customer should NOT be asked to "STFU" if the product they received is not working as advertised or to their satisfaction. Any company that expected customers to do such a thing would be committing PR suicide...

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

You are doing great......just way too many NOKIA apologizers on this board

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

I am not apologizing for Nokia in the slightest. What I am suggesting is that people stop creating the same whining Goddamn threads over and friggin over again and take some responsibility for yourselves. You bought the device obviously right out of the gate. You could have waited several weeks and seen what shook out, but you didn't you wanted your toy NOW NOW NOW and you are paying the price for being a first adopter.

So either suck it up and try make the device better through contributing bug reports/brainstorms, sell it and GTFO and stop polluting the boards with pointless threads or keep the device and just STFU and stop polluting the boards with pointless threads

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

But you don't seem to understand, that there is no way that they CAN with this development model, as so much of the system is developed outside of their own internal processes.

To further expound,

PulseAudio is always running on the system, and it is routing audio to and from the various ports on the system, be it the headphone port, audio through bluetooth, etc.

Due to the architecture of the underlying sound drivers (which are written in ALSA), switching between headphones, to speakers, to bluetooth etc would possibly require changes in the output format of the sound, which requires reinitialization of buffers, etc... This is very messy, programmatically....

so instead, PulseAudio controls all audio ports and dynamically mixes everything down to the appropriate targets in real time. This takes CPU time...

Further CPU time is also taken by the codecs and sinks that make up the gstreamer pipeline. Due to architectural constraints in gstreamer, there are many of these conversions (some of them are heavily duplicated) many times a second...this can be made more efficient...this is clerical work that must be done alongside architectural refinement (not an easy task, but not insurmountable either)...

couple this with the fact that there are many processes running at different times (the tracker indexer is a good example of I/O suckage that happens at odd times), and that accesses to hardware drivers often pre-empt the kernel (the kernel in maemo is preemptive, this means that accesses to hardware have the capability to temporarily pre-empt, that is, suspend, kernel code so that they can quickly access the hardware, this can temporarily suspend the scheduler for short periods of time so that processes aren't running...), you have situations where a lot of things need to be optimized...

...this will happen...but it will take those of us who are willing to help out to make it happen...not just for coding, but for reporting bugs, etc...

things that will help this situation:

(1) make pulseaudio be nicer on hardware device accesses
(2) make other processes be nicer on the CPU (particularly in minimizing the I/O access, so that iowait can be brought to a minimum.. I/O in embedded devices is a premium resource which must be carefully rationed)
(3) optimized CODECs...while some of the shipped codecs use DSP calls to the OMAP's TI DSP, some don't, and these need to be rewritten to do so. If you install a community compiled gstreamer plugin, there is a chance it will not use the DSP.
(4) make gstreamer as a whole more efficient when doing things like memory copies (critical for moving data between sinks), and minimize the number of conversions needed between sinks.

those are just a few examples,
again, don't worry, it will get there...just understand that quite a bit of these improvements won't come from Nokia, but from the open source community at large.

-Thom

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

You have a bad attitude.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

in THAT case, i think u had a cooling off period??? or distant-selling regulation if u bought online??
I had 7 days to return my phone and cancel my contract if i didnt like it.. Im still in the 7-day period at the moment....

BUT the nexus one is not in the UK yet, and I dont want to order it from us because of phone insurance issues.. and the HD2 is too big for me... so i'd rather stay with the N900 and probably sell it later on if some issues dont get sorted...

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

Thom, thanks for those explanations. Do you know if, as new versions of PulseAudio are released, we can update to them via the App Manager or do we have to wait for a new firmware release?

Anyway, I'm not sure if PulseAudio should be blamed for the sluggishness of the system when using the Media Player, since in my experience it is the mediaplayer process itself that sometimes takes over most of the CPU. PulseAudio rarely seems to go over 20%, and other media players don't seem to have as much of an impact either (not that I have used them as often as the default one).

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

Seriously? Have you looked at Guber99? I mean really LOOKED????

Hit the search, put in Guber99's name in the username box and show "threads started by user".. go on.

SIX

Count them...

SIX

God damned threads that say the exact same thing under the guise of a different title.

And THAT'S IT!

NOTHING ELSE... NADA ZIP ZILCH NOTHING!!!!

SIX

I hereby declare my support for Bratag's bad attitude.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

So ignore him. It's not an excuse for a bad attitude.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

In General? No.. with regards to a specific person?.. yes.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

Due to the low level placement of the code, we may only see improvements to pulseaudio initially via firmware updates... I can't answer that....

As for the other part of your reply, it's not just CPU. Pay close attention to iowait (%wa) in top. It's not just CPU time being wasted, it's also the amount of time the CPU has to wait for I/O to complete, these two critical pieces of information can tell us a lot about where the bottlenecks are and how to fix them.

-Thom

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

if every goddamn person waited several weeks, who the F will buy the device then?? Developers? or nokia employees?? or reviewers?? Anything u buy nowadays, u expect it to be fully in 100% working condition and with no/minimum bug..

if everyone Shuts the F up like u and complete bug forms all the time, what will Nokia employee do? read ur bug forms? or get on with it and make the goddamn thing work??

This is supposed to be a fully functional device, I / we are not testers, to report bugs to nokia..

and what the hell is a FORUM for?? to only please yourself with "ahh what a great device I have" "I will not replace it for years" "this is my laptop replacement" ??
If so, u can go to other threads and please yourself and GTF out of here if u dnt like

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

The problem is not that people come here with a problem. (in fact the OP didn't bother me at all)

The problem is how they handle and address that problem. If they make a thread: "Hey, Why is XYZ Broke?" that's fine. Hell, even if it's already been talked about 30 times the user is generally forgiven for being new and someone like myself will link them to the other 30 threads that already exist with their problem.

Usually it ends in one of these categories: Already been fixed, will be fixed, isn't going to be fixed, is being looked at.

A sane normal fricking person should be like "Oh, ok.. well that sucks." And at this point they make the conscious decision to either return the device because it's a deal breaker, or keep the device to see what's coming.

What sane people should not be doing is making their bloody mission in life to plague the forums in every thread screaming how much the N900 sucks because XYZ doesn't work.

To defend such actions is just ... insanity to me. Unbelievable insanity.

Valid, honest to god complaints are one thing.. ranting - raving and whining are something completely different. Bratag looks to me like he tried clarifying that within the second sentence of his post.

What you *shouldn't* do.. is create thread, after thread, after thread, of the *same* thing, just to repeat for everyone to see in a new location that you think the N900 sucks. WE GET IT.. move along now.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

yes definitely thats wrong to create similar threads over and over again... I personally love the device. although its not perfect ....

what I have been seeing everywhere is that a lot of people think that nobody can complain if they find something wrong or dont like something about the device..... ( I dont know about the op / this specific thread)....

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

I admit that I've seen an increase of this type of mentality. I, myself sometimes suffer from it.

I think it's largely due to the fact that people get tired of seeing the same thing, over and over again - and sometimes we forget to look at who is asking the question.

A new person to the forums can be forgiven... after complaining about something a dozen different times in a dozen different locations... I start to become less and less forgiving.

Normally I would have avoided this thread completely.. but when I saw who Bratag was responding too - and a bunch of people jump on Bratag for it... I'm sorry - but that guy brings it on himself.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

Until it has folder view, I probably won't use it... tags aren't always the best way to organize data.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

People get frustrated and post their anger because the device does not do as it has been advertised. Rushing the half baked device is the reason for this. Open source is not answer to the woes of the N900. You use open source to enhance the inherent functionality of the device. What Nokia has thrown in the market is a device with unfinished thought and thinking.There was lot of Hype on N900 and lot of people wanted to change from iphone etc to the new device which on paper looked great and lot of people fell for that. However the bar was set high by iphone or similar devices and when they start using N900 , after the initial jubilation of owning a fantastic hardware the realization start sinking in that this device needs 3 to 4 software revs before it can be useful. Some people have patience to wait this out some people do not have and hence the frustration comes out. This device is diamond in rough. IT is upto Nokia and not mameo forum to make this polished device and frankly Nokia's commitment to continue development of symbian and mameo together is really questionable in long term and this period uncertanity will hurt mameo platform more than Symbian.
I am still holding on to N900 for next rev of software and then will decide to keep it or go back to Nexus/Iphone land again. Because if they do not fix the issues mentioned in the mameo forum for N900 then it is pointless to keep this device for just phone function. This is humble opinion.
Thanks for reading.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

I would imagine it's more the tone and substance of the complaint than anything else. Going through this thread, one sees on the one hand angry rants about the media player sucking for pretty vague reasons, and on the other hand specific complaints about what is not perceived to work properly or what desired features are missing. The first is guaranteed to create a 100 post scream-fest, the later very likely will barely be objected to, even if the same user is creating multiple threads on the same or similar topics.

For me, the media player works perfectly fine, even though it's a fairly barebones app. I also spent quite a bit of time cleaning up the library on my PC and tagging media files so it would display properly, but it's a minor price to pay. It was a mess anyway.

The only aspect I don't like is that the audio stream player skips to the next stream if the stream interrupts. Plus the edit and delete stream buttons need to be made more obvious instead of hidden.

I don't have an Ipod or other dedicated media-player, so I can't compare, but to me the audio is excellent regardless of the music style (though admittedly hip hop sounds probably just as atrocious on the N900 as on any other media device). And I'm using my N900 hours every day especially for that purpose.

I tested opening heavy websites like the WashingtonPost.com while streaming audio over the same WLAN and there's no stuttering whatsoever. When I call my own phone, the music simply stops properly and the incoming call audio starts playing. When I reject the call or end the call, the music simply continues. All quite unlike what some others in this thread claim to experience. Then again, that probably makes me a Nokia apologist in the eyes of some.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

I think N900 has issue with audio multiplexing, it seems very like only one process can play the audio at a time instead of mutliple sound source can be multiplexed to gether, so causing cut off of playing audio

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

i just noticed this problem..... did u all mean that the music player recognises only the songs in the "Automatic playlist" and not in the "imported"/?? as from "albums", everything seems to be ok....

is there no aftermarket media player for it???

oops... my song paused and the "battery low" sound came... it didnt resume the music ....

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

As far as I'm concerned, the mediaplayer isn't that closed. The open source mafw plugins are doing most of the work. I've posted this elsewhere, but here seems appropriate also.

At the moment, it's about 20 lines of code to throw this front end on the very ugly mafw-test-gui. This community could replicate and move way beyond the mediaplayer in a month. That would include stuff like Pandora and mpd support. And I'm probably being conservative. It might be a good time to consolidate.

Attachment 7058

I'll post a diff file over the next few days if anyone wants to play around. It's a working audio player. Videos are sound only at the moment; Nokia didn't bother to send the video to the screen, but that's generally a simple fix when using gstreamer.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

unfortunately there is no standard. If there were an industry standard it would be easy to transfer music and know exactly how it will appear on the device.

ipod/iphone
album artist -> album
title1 - artist1 - albumart
title2 - artist2 - ..

N900
artist / album
title1 - albumart
title2 - ..

I hope you can see the difference and why music tagged for one device will not be sorted by another device as expected. Personally ipod method is better because it involves assigning multiple artists for the same song title which is not available for n900.

In n900, using a software like mp3tag. Use Artist Tag (in place of album artist tag), you can use extended tags for album art but i think you already have that covered so good job on that front.

and thats primarily it. I hope it gets your music organized

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

I'd be interested, but only from a curiosity perspective as I lack a lot of knowledge.
If you want labels under the buttons, but don't have time to implement something custom, you can steal the Application Manager's HildonFancyButton: http://maemo.gitorious.org/hildon-ap...fancy-button.c
The problem with that: It only shows one label underneath the button, not two like the Media Player's custom widget (*sigh*, Nokia. The clock has its own widget for this and the same with the Media Player and Application Manager. Mauku has its own cloned version. Wouldn't it have been easier to just collaborate efforts and put it in libhildon instead of sticking to closed-source ways? /rant). Easily remedied, though, I assume.

I'd also suggest a Garage project so that people could collaborate but then you'll probably get people ignoring the development status part and asking for feature requests like "P0RtRAIT ModE support so I can jerk off while watching my videos" (of course, people disregarding the fact that it probably wouldn't be able to play videos at that moment in time...).

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

for the heck of it, i ran a simple test. with only media player running cpu usage to run a music file is around ~20-23 %, when u start a new song cpu went as high as ~50% dopping down to normal range thats by keeping playback instant.

in layman terms, with 256 MB + 768 MB available to n900 u will have to have abt 512+ used somewhere before music stutters starting a song and abt 750MB used somewhere before music playback stutters. good luck with that.

then i ran following apps alongside media player:
calendar, photos, anglometer, angry birds, web, cube, phone, conversations, email

thats 10 apps running including media player. There was no stutter in media playback whatsoever during this time, this also includes starting a song. Then i called my phone while running these apps and call halts the music and came back after call ended. Again nothing. No delay in task-switcher either

I hope this answers what started this thread

--
the game 'Airport' causes some serious delay in task-switcher as it keeps running heavy graphics in switcher mode too.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

The media player *does* pause and resume around a phone call for me. I don't understand why it doesn't for you. I was listening to MP3s ripped to 160k/sec if I remember correctly.

Admittedly it does pause and stutter somewhat during the switchover, but not enough to annoy me or for me even to mention it to someone unless I knew beforehand that they were likely to be irritated by it.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

Actually the N900 was ne of the LEAST hyped Nokia devices ever released. It was almost as if they were purposely keeping it very low key. Advertising was almost nil prior to release.

This has been said so many times before, but if the reason you bought the N900 was to replace an iPhone that you already liked - you were always going to be disappointed. The N900 was in no way aimed at the iPhone crowd.

Finally my whole point in this thread has been that posting the same whining comment over and over and over in new thread after new thread after new thread, does NOTHING to help the situation and just makes you seem like a whiner - which is more than likely exactly what they are.

Personally I will be extremely happy when the "Oooh shiny toy" crowd gets rid of the device and thins out a little. Then the people who are actually serious about making Maemo the most hacker friendly and ultimately user friendly OS available can get down to business without having to explain to whiners what being an early adopter means.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

I believe it's muted, not paused, which is not the same

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

Do you mean that since your CPU isn't maxing out (in your particular case) that you would have to max out your RAM usage for music to stutter (by not being able to buffer)?

I don't have stuttering problems as often since PR1.1 but the stuttering issue in all the cases that I've had is definitely due to CPU spikes. I don't think your test case proves there is no issue. Enough people have stuttering issues to consider that the performance of the media player needs to be improved. There are issues with indexing, video thumbnailing/playback that I'm sure can contribute to the problem. It isn't just "open music player, play song, stuttering audio". I don't think it's just people overloading their device.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

@qwerty12

I think you know me well enough by now and understand how I choose to contribute. We're both similar that way and that's enough said for the time being; maybe I'll speak more to that later.

But as far as hacking the mediaplayer, I'm using a Fixed container with Images inside EventBoxes. So I can put stuff wherever, and I've been getting pretty good at manipulating Images and Pixbufs during mouse events. The background is actually a Pixmap that I set as a Drawable's background, and I don't ever have to deal with it again. A major optimization that everyone should be doing. Those two different fonts won't be a problem because I can always put the EventBox inside a VBox with 2 Labels if need be.

But the funniest thing is how they're doing that silly 4-bar frequency graph. It's just a random ordering of a hand full of images! I mean shiit, I already have audio playback/record stuff in Python where I'm using numpy to do an FFT in realtime. Whatever, like I said, no real rocket science going on here. They should just open it up; it would get better so fast.

Re: I'll Say It Again: The Media Player Stinks
 

This may have been true prior to release, but not any more. Every branch of the Carphone Warehouse that I have walked past recently (in the UK) has had at least one N900 poster in the window.

Good luck with that. The N900 is being marketed (again, in the UK at least) as an iPhone competitor. And isn't it a bit ridiculous to say that only a particular type of person can use a particular device?