Notices

Hi,
I have been using Canola as a "desktop" media center.

I had a HP L2335 (23") lcd which I no longer use. So I thought I will build a slim media center that I can mount in the kitchen. After doing some research I found HP Thinclients as a viable option. I bought a HP t5720 from ebay for 100£. Its a pretty system with 1 GHz proc and 1 GB RAM. Since its a thinclient it doenst have any hard disk and is absolutely noiseless. There is a 450MB flash memory, which is useless for any full blown linux. So I added an 8GB Sandisk USB and installed Ubuntu hardy heron on it. My initial notion was to install Myth and use the local media alone since there are no PCI expansion slots for me to add a tv card and I didnt really need tv on this one. After playing with Myth and Elisa(which for some reason needs h/w 3d accelration) I almost gave up on the media center idea. But then I decided to try Canola on desktop and see how usable it is on a desktop without the tough interface. I am surprised to see how smooth it is. I run it at 1024 x 768 but I tried it at 1920 x 1200 and it works perfectly.

here is canola playing a movie from my external hdd

all i had to do was to create a symbolic link from the media source (external hdd) in the Videos folder and update the content.

Its pretty slick to browse through pictures.


For now I use my sony ericsson phone(k750) as the remote. But i am thinking of more intuitive interface like Wiimote. Any one used a wiimote with canola ? I think it will pretty useful for photo albums !

HP claims it is possible to mount the client between the lcd and the wall !


Audio works great including podcast. Photocast works. Internet radio works too. I haven't got the youtube plugin yet. I am still using totem to play you tube videos. I use a M$ 7000 bluetooth keyboard. Has anyone got the youtube plugin working on canola desktop version ?

Wii Remotes can be configured to do anything on linux.

Two Easy Choices:

Cwiid: You can map the buttons to ONE key, Joystick Axis, or Mouse Button.

Xwii: You can map the buttons to MULTIPLE keys, External Commands (like Bash Scripts, pretty much any one line command you can to in a terminal), joystick, ans mouse button. It also has a nice "flick" ability, which I like.

So, I would use Xwii to map the wii to the right buttons. the only problem with Xwii is its mouse emulation sucks compared to Cwiid, so if you need a mouse control, use that.

Hi This is nice

We develop canola on full HD monitors so we have been playing with that fullscreen in the desktop for a while.

Tips : We are opensourcing the full application in the next month, and there's easy ways to create a theme for Television, and to allow keyboard and mouse interactions are ready (things like focus on elements and so on) so we will integrate this in the opensource code to allow more experiements like yours.

Othe nice thing will be a custom theme for that, we can help with the design (actually we have a couple of media center like designs for canola) and if people wanna dig in Edje to do that, we can actually go a little further doing really nice features for it

About the youtube plugin on the desktop, please join us at the channel or mail me
at handful @ gmail , that I will point you to the place where you can get the info (or the person like fleury)

BR

MArcelo

Just out of curiosity, does Canola have a bookmarking function yet? For me, anything that deals with media should allow you to listen to a file such as a podcast and not have to start at the beginning if you have to stop listening. So far there is not one "media player" for the N800 that has this function. Is this a difficult function to implement or does everyone just listen to music?

Joef: no, unfortunately not yet : / but as we are guiding some students in the development of a audio book feature, bookmark is coming

Joef: it's not difficult. To be really honest, features are never dificcult to implement, but when you need a software that has a little bit more features, you need to test it, make sure it doesnt break anything, think about the problems that may appear.. so
it takes time. I would say that it's a rather simple one (podcast is doing but only if you do not close canola- a bug - it was supposed to bookmark everything)

The goal now is to provide this feature, but as I always say here we had "more complicated" problems to solve: scanner, stability, improving playability etc.
When you have limited development power, "prioritizing" is always pain..so we listen to bugs here in the ITT and the most complained ones get solved first.. or enter the queue in the higher possible position!

but don't worry we all agree that bookmark is needed!

BR

Thanks for the reply. I'll have to hang onto my Zire 31 a while longer...:-)

Hi,
I tried following the instructions at
http://blog.eduardofleury.com/archives/2008/04/24/


But i keep getting this error
I tired all the avialable versions of canola plugin and i keep getting the same error
Any help on this would be great.

Thanks