Thread: Best Music and Video Player for OS2008
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pycage is offline pycage
2007-12-30 , 15:06
Posts: 3,404 | Thanked: 4,474 times | Joined on Oct 2005 @ Germany
#34
Originally Posted by slip View Post
If I uninstall MPlayer, will MediaBox still work?
It will start but will complain about not finding mplayer. It can still be used for FM radio and images, though.

Originally Posted by slip View Post
I am in love with the photo viewer in Canola2. I showed off photos of my baby niece over the holidays and everyone loved flipping through the photos.
Yeah, Canola2's photo viewer is awesome! Kudos to the Canola guys!

Originally Posted by slip View Post
Since the device does not have dedicated volume controls and Canola runs in full screen, this is really helpful. MediaBox lacks this feature, as far as I can tell, meaning that you have to go out to the Home screen to change the volume.
You can use the hardware +/- buttons of the device for volume control in MediaBox. It was a design decision to remove volume
control from the GUI, since it took up space for something that's available through the hw keys anyway.

Originally Posted by slip View Post
-No FM Radio (not a necessity, but MediaBox has it)
MediaBox is happy to share its FM radio code with other projects. It's LGPL'd and thus also usable by closed source Canola2.
http://pyfmradio.garage.maemo.org.

Originally Posted by slip View Post
The kinetic scrolling (up/down) seems to be a bit smoother in MediaBox than in Canola2. One reason for this might be that the areas you touch to scroll can not be used to select/open, so this is no conflict for the software to try to discern what your intention is with every touch. This also leads to one of my gripes...
Actually scrolling smoothness is not affected by the clickable area. It was a design decision to make kinetic scrolling more usable without opening files by accident. The little arrow only shows you that you can click here to open the file. The whole right side of the thumbnail can be touched for opening.

Originally Posted by slip View Post
-Seems to take a long time every launch to find media. (more than Canola, at least)
It takes most time for loading the thumbnails and writing the captions. I fully agree that this has to speed up.

Originally Posted by slip View Post
-When a track or video is playing, the controls are hidden. You have to actively switch to view them by clicking on the arrow.
Screen estate is limited and I found this to be the best way to do it. But I'm open to better suggestions.

Originally Posted by slip View Post
-No exit on-screen (At least with Canola, if you back all the way out it will ask if you want to exit...MediaBox forces you to use the hardware keys. Not a huge deal, but a little annoying)
It was a design decision. But there is an exit button on the preferences screen. OK, so it's two clicks instead of one to exit,
but I don't think that's a big problem. There's always the Escape hw key as well.

Originally Posted by slip View Post
-FM radio frequency scanning doesn't stop on any stations. Also, if you try to find a station by clicking on the horizontal tuner bar, it is nearly impossible to fine-tune. I guess you really need to set up your stations outside of MediaBox.
It's hard to tell whether the signal is a properly tuned station, or an improperly tuned one with a strong signal.
The treshold I set was tested to be OK in the areas where I usually am. There's still a lot of room for improvements.
 

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