Recommended media player? (Nokia N810)
 

Hi, I purchased my Nokia N810 today and love it. I will soon be adding video and pictures to my device, and was wondering what's the most popular or 'best' media player/media viewer to use?

I am hoping an experienced member here can guide me as I know there are several different types of media player. With no Internet Access on the device yet, I cannot experience them all to decide what I like best.

Re: Recommended media player? (Nokia N810)
 

I recommend Canola. It has the best UI by far (very smooth and finger-friendly), a bunch of themes and plugins, and is very easy to use.

Re: Recommended media player? (Nokia N810)
 

Although Canola is nice, I prefer MediaBox.

Re: Recommended media player? (Nokia N810)
 

Thanks guys, I will check out both Conola and Mediabox, but from what I see on Conola, it looks fantastic

Re: Recommended media player? (Nokia N810)
 

I downloaded Canola and Mplayer (I want to try Mediabox and will do later)

Canola looks fantasic and it's easy to use. Mplayer has no touch screen support for the menu, it's hard to fast forward the track and the libary list is just plain text. I transferred an array of video files from my PC to my N810 and tested them out on the 2 media players, as well as Nokia's default media player.

Out of the 3 players, Canola had trouble running most of my videos, while the default player played half ok. Mplayer had trouble with only the HD mp4 files and I think WMV. Every other format I tried worked fine.

I have a video of planets in space, where it zooms out of our galaxy and into another. Canola was able to play this AVI file but there was odd artifacts in the black and the video ran a little slow. In Mplayer, it ran perfectly. I have a music video and with Canola, the video's width is squashed but in Mplayer it plays fullscreen perfectly.

Canola is nice but I like Mplayer much better. I will keep both installed though as Canola is good for Youtube and may play other formats that Mplayer cannot.

I have 2 questions:

1) How do I set my default media player to Mplayer?

2) Are there plugins for Mplayer. Canola or the default player that allow support for more formats?

Thanks

Re: Recommended media player? (Nokia N810)
 

You know you really should recode your videos for the NIT. If you optimize the videos they will play flawless in Canola.

Clinton

Re: Recommended media player? (Nokia N810)
 

Freakair, yes, I understand, I do this for my Nintendo DSi so they run better (or run at all). What would you suggest I encode them to? I have suitable software on my computer for this but I have many options, which video format works best? What is the maximum bitrate or dimensions a video can be before the N810 has a problem?

Re: Recommended media player? (Nokia N810)
 

MPEG4 video at 30fps or less around 1000Kbps, at a resolution no greater than 400x240 (fit whichever dimension hits the edge first depending on aspect ratio) with MP3 audio—perfect playback, every time.

This is a copy and paste form a post by GeneralAntillies, but it's pretty much what I've been using for the last year on the N800. Works well for me.

Re: Recommended media player? (Nokia N810)
 

I shall try it but I have some HD MPEG4 files and they do not play with Canola, and Mplayer can run them but it's extremely slow.

Re: Recommended media player? (Nokia N810)
 

Please see "Video encoding" in the Wiki.

Re: Recommended media player? (Nokia N810)
 

sjgadsby, I am not new to video encoding, I do it all the time, from setting up vidoes for my mobile phone and Nintendo DSi to making watchable DVD's from various different video formats. Freakair has given me a good baseline to start my encoding settings on.

Re: Recommended media player? (Nokia N810)
 

I did not mean to imply the contrary. The first section of the web page to which I pointed you contains answers to the questions you asked in richer detail than Freakair provided. Nothing beyond sharing that resource was intended by my post.

Re: Recommended media player? (Nokia N810)
 

Ah, no problem, I just wanted to state that I am experience with video encoding if you thought I wasn't.

Thanks, I am very glad I signed up to this forum, I've received nothing but friendly help!

Re: Recommended media player? (Nokia N810)
 

2 questions:

1) With Canola, when using the Youtube browser, after scrolling a page full of results, I see no "next page" button or anyway to advance to the next page. So when I run a Youtube search, am I only able to view page 1?

2) With Mediabox using the Youtube plugin, when viewing a Youtube video, how can you fast forward a video? I advance the seek bar with my stylus, but the video does not skip ahead.

Re: Recommended media player? (Nokia N810)
 

I think yes.

mplayer (which is used for playing YouTube videos in MyTube, MediaBox, and Canola) does not support forward seeking in Flash videos. Besides that, YouTube videos go through a local webserver in MediaBox for proper buffering with mplayer (otherwise you'd drop off the end of file with mplayer if the download transfer rate was too low), which makes seeking even more complicated.

Re: Recommended media player? (Nokia N810)
 

Why would anyone use Canola to browse Youtube videos if you can only view one page of results? Sounds rather silly to me.

Re: Recommended media player? (Nokia N810)
 

I've spent a fair amount of time with the stock Media Player, Canola, and Media Box; additionally I have MPlayer installed and use it for videos.

I prefer Media Box because it works really well for internet radio, which is what I use the N800 for most of the time it's in use. It displays the song-artist-album-etc metadata that come along in a stream, and it shows the rest of my favorite streams on the same screen, so changing streams is easy, quick, and thumb-friendly.

Media Player displays the metadata too, and it really isn't bad, except for its unappealing look-and-feel. Canola has a great look-and-feel, but it's rather basic in its functionality with streams and playlists.

Re: Recommended media player? (Nokia N810)
 

I think Canola is big. I am using several applications instead: youamp, Mplayer, and quick view for pics. By this way, I can run what I want to.

Re: Recommended media player? (Nokia N810)
 

Can we have a music player with a equalizer please. treble boost prefered !

Re: Recommended media player? (Nokia N810)
 

xmms has been ported to maemo, and features an equalizer. xmms doesn't use the DSP for audio decoding IIRC, so this may put a higher burden on the battery, though.

Re: Recommended media player? (Nokia N810)
 

kmplayer and media box works well with worldtv99, my chosen video players. If problems, I go straight to xterm/mplayer.

bun