New Media player home widget
 

I just found this; Media Player Home Widget, in the repo's. http://maemo.org/packages/package_in...er-widget/0.1/
I've installed and quickly tested it and it seems to work great, very simple looks and functionality, however this is just the initiall release and hopefully it'll get better with each update.
Even if it just stays exactly as it is though, its great to have a reliable working media player widget.
Thanks for the great work nicolai, you've done what nokia and all their resources couldn't:D

Re: New Media player home widget
 

Can you provide a screenshot?

Re: New Media player home widget
 

Re: New Media player home widget
 

the name of the app and name of developer makes this look really promising....

Re: New Media player home widget
 

wtf???? skinable???? allright!!! XD

Re: New Media player home widget
 

ehm... installed it, but its just blank and i can't configure it?! o.O
do i have to do something special to make it work? ^^

Re: New Media player home widget
 

can some1 explain to me what is different betweem this an the default music widget ??

Re: New Media player home widget
 

Fantastic wee widget ... Again by the master of Widgets... just hope he can make it scalable and also add scalable Album art plus the option to rearange the buttons ie postions and size...

Then it would be a MUST Have widget..

great work as alway Nicolai

Kind regards Qosmio

Re: New Media player home widget
 

IT works all the time...

Re: New Media player home widget
 

Yeah, it works:D

Re: New Media player home widget
 

you posted a screen shot with different buttons how did you chamge that ! have installed it an seems ok so far . .

Re: New Media player home widget
 

Not at the MO but he might be able to do that! if you ask him!.. I changed the Png's to fit with my screens.... Sorry if it gave the wrong message!!

I have removed the post.

Regards Qosmio

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...588#post885588

Re: New Media player home widget
 

I noticed this late last night. I thought I would let someone else try it first. ;) Sounds great, so I'll install it now that I know it won't blow up my N900. :D

Re: New Media player home widget
 

You can change images
Check this folder: /usr/share/pixmaps/media-player-widget/

Re: New Media player home widget
 

mhm... i had to start the default media player and play one song to get the information displayed in the widget.

but now it's working fine.

to-do: album-art and opening media-player by clicking album-art, maybe a way to switch between repeat- and random-modes. :)

but nice widget. i like it :D

Re: New Media player home widget
 

Just to clarify, the bug tracker for this project is an email link to Nicolai? I don't want to start spamming the man with bugs, or is that the SOP for these things?

I've found that using this widget, playing a playlist with the media player open, then closing the media player, causes the BH-214 bluetooth headset controls to stop functioning. Running the widget with the media player open, works great.

Re: New Media player home widget
 

Hi,
yes I am working on a media playwer widget.
At the moment it only works while the mediaplayer is open
(or the stock media player widget is used).

I will make an announcement when it is more stable and
ready for testing.

regards
Nicolai

Re: New Media player home widget
 

grt widget frm the developer.... good going,

Re: New Media player home widget
 

Nicolai
Thanks very much for your great work
I tried the widget. It works much nicer than the built in one, less resource, no lag, no freezing. Very nice indeed.
But I tried to use the stop/play button on my bluetooth headset (cheap one anyway) and it doesnot respond. The builtin widget responds well with bluetooth controller.
Is it because my buffalo headset not supported or your widget has yet this function included?
Keep up the great work!

Re: New Media player home widget
 

Hi,

new version 0.2.
Still a little bit unstable. New features:
- works without opening the mediaplayer application
- shows album art
- tap on album to open mediaplayer application
- tap on title label opens a dialog to select a playlist
(for me, the most important feature)

Can please someone, who has problems with the playbutton
with the stock mediaplayer widget, try if this problem doesn't
occur with this widget.

I don't know why there is a problem with bluetooth headsets, and
I can not test this (don't have one).

I had to trick the loading and unloading of this widget, due to
the nature of the mediaframework and how hildon-home plugins
are handled. So if you try to change the widget icons you need
to reboot your device (or restart hildon-home) to make the changes
visible.

Have fun,
Nicolai

Re: New Media player home widget
 

For me, using the play button attempts to open a new media player window, which immediately closes. It does also switch between play/pause states, since if I go to play the already chosen video, it will begin in a paused state.

Re: New Media player home widget
 

ah, ok I see. this happens when you used the media player
to play a video the last time it was used. I didn't test tihs.
Thank you for reporting this.

Re: New Media player home widget
 

I can confirm that my play button does not work on the default widget but works perfectly well on this one. Well done. Don't mean to turn this into a Nokia bashing post but it is very disgraceful that a year after the device came out Nokia has been unable to fix the faulty widget and a single individual has been able to create a working one.

Just a couple of points:

1. The widget does not pick up the widget transparency setting in theme customizer. I had to go into /opt/usr/share/pixmaps/media-player-widget and change the label and player pngs to transparent ones.

2. The playlist tab picks up playlists I created on the device but does not pick up ones I created externally. Would be nice if possible for it to pick up external playlists as basically all my playllists are created on my PC.

Re: New Media player home widget
 

Hi etuoyo,
good to hear that.
I must admit, working with the media framework is difficult.
In the last few days I got more sympathy, for whoever developed
the maemo5 media player widget.

It is difficult to get it working right for different cases. For example:
- install the applet when the mediaplayer does not run
- install the applet when the mediaplayer does run
- add the widget to the desktop when the mediaplayer does not run
- add the widget to the desktop when the mediaplayer does run
- load the applet right after boot
All this circumstances has to be handled differently.
And even after all of this, I missed the case where the mediaplayer
had played video file, so my widget does not work properly
after playing a video file.


Ok, I am not sure how the mediaframework handles these playlists. But
there must be a way to do it.
regards
Nicolai

Re: New Media player home widget
 

Suggestion; make the widget use current theme's mediaplayer graphics (/etc/hildon/theme/images/), that way it would integrate into rest of user's theme nicely?

Re: New Media player home widget
 

hi nicolai,
as said before: great widget.

two things i noticed:
1. after updating to the latest version i had to restart my phone to get it showing up and working. (but this shouldn't be a big problem at all i think)
2. this one is strange:
when playing a song via your widget and clicking the album art, the media player opens up as mentioned.
but when clicking the round play-button in the lower right corner, the media player goes to the title view.
there the album art is displayed correctly but the song information is wrong.
the song information seems always to be the one which i last listened to via the media player itself.
after the current song finishes playing, it swtiches to next song and there is everything right (album-art and song information)

Re: New Media player home widget
 

Thank you Nicolai
I update to v0.2, everything fine for me, except bluetooth controller.
A funny discovery: with your widget alone, the bluetooth controller is no use, but if I put your widget side by side with the built in one, both widgets respond to the controller stimutaneously.
If I turn off the built in one, yours again refuse to listen to the controller.
Tried reboot but same result.

Re: New Media player home widget
 

Good point.
But I am not sure what to do, so that the widgets knows when
the user changes the current theme. Otherwise users will
ask me why my widget does not automatically updates.

Nicolai

Re: New Media player home widget
 

The graphics will be auto-updates since when user changes theme, hildon-home is powered down and up.

Re: New Media player home widget
 

Thx. Have not tested this yet, but will do it later. The play button still don't work onthe default media player widget and I don't want to report it since nokia closed the bug. So now I'm hopping this widget can solve the problem once and for all.

Re: New Media player home widget
 

I use the media player widget and FM transmitter almost daily. I've experienced countless times where the widget stop responding. I need to remove the widget and reset it back (sometimes it removes my other widgets on all 4 screens). That usually solves the widget problem...but not a very good and effective way.

Any suggestions?:rolleyes:

Re: New Media player home widget
 

2. The playlist tab picks up playlists I created on the device but does not pick up ones I created externally. Would be nice if possible for it to pick up external playlists as basically all my playllists are created on my PC.[/QUOTE]

YES YES! This would be fantastic. probably the one absolute annoyance I have the most with my awesome n900 is having to make new playlists "on" the device. If you think you can do this Nicoloai then please try?? Thanks very much

Re: New Media player home widget
 

But we are talking about external playlists that are shown in the
mediaplayer application, right?

Re: New Media player home widget
 

I can't speak for anyone else, but for me I would just like to somehow just keep the order of songs, or playlists from pc to n900. I have the same songs on my Laptop as I do on my n900 but I can't use the preordered playlists like i use on windows media player. It's just frustrating to have to create new playlists between devices...???

Re: New Media player home widget
 

I have both widgets on my desktop, default one doesn't start playing and this one does.

When I open the playlist menu its title is "hildon-home". And if I try to scroll the list it will scroll between my home screen. Also if I click above it (to cancel) it will start playing if it was stopped.

Re: New Media player home widget
 

Precisely. I have around 30 playlists I created on PC with media monkey and transferred to the N900 using drag and drop. I also have two playlists I created on the N900. The N900 media player picks up all 30 plus playlists and they work fine. This widget only picks up the 2 created on the device.

Re: New Media player home widget
 

hmmm last time I looked maemo bug report about this there was people basically:
-commenting that nokia widget doesn't work (very helpful....not)
-not listing their installed apps
-not giving instructions how to reproduce bug

So where is problem then? Probably something to do with other installed widgets.

Nokia widget works on my n900 just as it should work but then again i have just two widgets placed on desktops.

Re: New Media player home widget
 

Me too, my maemo media player widget works as well.
I tried hard to reproduce the play button bug. I usally have many
apps and desktop widgets from extras-devel. But I never had
this play button bug. I think it is somewhree related to the media
files. But I am happy my new media player widget works for
those users which have the play button bug.

Nicolai

Re: New Media player home widget
 

I found a way to read this playlists. Now I just need some time
to implement this :-)

Re: New Media player home widget
 

That is by the by. Fact of the matter is that it is possible to get it to work on all N900s but Nokia did not. And there are many bugs they expressly decided they would not be fixing on maemo 5 and it had nothing to do with whether they were fully reported or not. It is not up to users to solve all problems for Nokia. But I guess we have different views on such issues. If that is they carry that attitude into their meego device then well....