Notices

I would just like to say that I really like Canola 2. The youtube plugin, album art, skins, and everything else are great. Thanks for making it!

Hey Handful

Thanks again for an amazing app, I'm really appreciating Canola more than ever after spending over 30 hours in the car the past week!

A quick search didn't turn anything up on this, so I've got a feature/hack request,

Would it be possible for you to add

/media/usb/

to the list of folders you can ask canola to watch for media?
or if this is too user-specific (I might be the only one out here who plays movies/media off a usb stick) could you point me to a config file where I can add this?

Thank you!!
Josiah

Hi Guys,

in behalf of the team, thanks for the nice words. I think indeed usb is really high on our priority, so I will push it as much as I can to add this in the next beta!

Hi
I really tried to stay off the N8x0 versions, as I thought I was strong enough to wait for the next major release (and be able to live with my underpowered N770).
Well - Canola (and the UPNP plugin) made me realize that I "needed" a N8x0 - so I bought one 2 weeks ago on ebay, and what a thrill.

First thing I installed was Canola2 - and since I was about to go on a trip, I loaded an 8gb sd card with movies and music. In that process I found a few bugs:
Setup:
I put 35 albums (3,2 gb) and 10 short movies in xvid+mp3 format (240 mb) onto the sd card. Every mp3 has embedded cover art + folder.jpg image in each album folder.

1: [bug] Running the "cover arts and thumbnails" import imported about 80% of the covers - but for some odd reason some of the albums didn't get any cover art. I tried to unload all music on the sd card, and only put back the folders/albums that didn't work in the first run - and the second time, these covers were imported without a problem. It seems the cover art importer chokes when the "list is too long" (on a side note I am puzzled that canola2 wants to re import album art...)

2: [bug] Tried to play videos - but only got a blank screen. Tried to read documentation + website, but I could find no direct info about mplayer being bundled or not. Tried to install mplayer and restart canola - still nothing. Read some more, and learned that canola automatically switches to mplayer if it is installed. Rebooted the N800 - and voila - canola played the xvid videos fine.
It seems that canola doesn't look for mplayer installation on the fly - but only after reboot.

3: [bug] After canola had imported the mp3 info, there was a typing error in one of the names, resulting in two entries. I could not recreate this on the original files, as the "Artist" tag was the same. After some poking, I found out that the "Band" tag was wrong in some of the mp3 files - and it seems that canola2 uses the band tag for artist. This might be what you want - but would be nice to write this somewhere, so users are aware...

4: [bug] After the initial load of files, I wanted to reorganize the folder structure on the sd card. I did this, and went into settings in canola to change the media folders. Every time I tried to change the watch folder, canola set it back to the old folder. After a reboot canola had switched to the correct folder.

5: [suggestion] The thumbnail creator for videos uses a fixed ms for doing a screenshot. The videos I brought was the Pixar short movies - so I mostly ended up with either a black screen or the Pixar "logo". I think the option to create thumbnails is cool - but would be nice if the thumbnail creator either had a variable (longer) ms count before it took a screenshot - or that it presented the user with fx. 4 different images for each movie that you could choose from.

6: [suggestion] Playlist support would be nice - could be done with a button that switches between play and add mode. That of course brings up the whole backend needed to support playlists....

That's it for now - an amazing piece of software !

nikolajhendel

Hi! thanks for the very long feedback, and great detail on some actions.
indeed we received most of this bugs, and some of them are quite complicated because they deal with fully reload. Those may take a little more to " refresh " platform stuff. Mplayer embedded mode also has it's flaws, but this is a good tip and we will investigate more. A wizard is also need to improve the first usage experience.

The album covers, as you reloads, probably if you already have covers it will pass forward to the others, but as you said it's probably choking.. but in some file, because we do have 8 giga byte based media library for tests (with all kinds of files, from all countries etc) and it's going "ok". So we need to find out problematic files that triggers the bugs so we can fix it.

the number 4 is indeed true, we are working on this, trying to make a "hard" refresh, but it's also not as simple as we tought it would be. Nothing that cannot be fixed just needs time.

5: the thumbnail is actually (or it should) using a random number, but up to a maximum second indeed. You can go to the video, and from the options (not on fullscreen playback screen) you can choose set thumbnail in the desired frame. (it seems that some formats are returning black screens, but in our tests with most of supported formats it sets correctly.

6: playlist is already there. go to " on the move" or just click and hold a item, to add it to the playlist. After adding the files, you can go to playlist list and save the dynamic list with a name and start a new one. in the current version there's no recursive add, so you can add just music items (not albums, or artists) as this can generate some really have recursive adds, and we need to do it more carefully.

Anyways, thanks for the nice words, we are indeed running to improve it more and solve some of the issues you said, do better others, and so on , and feedback like yours are the best thing to guide us!

BR from brazil,

Marcelo

First, great work with Canola, it stoped me from replacing my Nokia with an iTouch.

I run Canola 2 beta 9 on my Nokia n770 with OS2007HE, and it works fine and fast most of the time. My only problem with it is that sometimes, when it should start a new song (first song or after it just played some), it just showes me the info for the next song and the small circle at the bottom is circling, but the song dosn't play. I can go to the next song, or go around in the menu without problems, just the next song refuses to play.

Otherwise, its just awesome.

Geek : on OS2006 and 2007 there is a non-fixed bug for DBUS that prevents some songs from being played, also Dbus is really old, thus you can fall into problems like these more often than in newer versions : /

If you can take a look and see if the file what is not playing sometimes has spaces, or strange characters, then it's the reason.

a thing you can do it's to make sure there's no unusual characters on your files name. :/

If not that.. and it's one song..etc send that to us so we can debug and kill if the bug is on canola...

Marcelo

Marcelo:
Thanks for the Info, will test some songs for lockups.

Marcelo: I'm finding that after deleting a couple albums, they still appear in the Artist and Album lists. Obviously if I go into the album, it says no items found. How do I get rid of them?

Spice: this refresh thing still an issue : / sorry for that, the thing is we need to always force refresh, but for those with 8gb cards this maybe painfully slow, so we need to come up with a better notification way to do that (we are improving the framework for that)

So, after deleting, did you do a "refresh library"? I know it will sound painful, but for now you can also go to media library, uncheck everything, refresh... and then check back your disk and refresh.. this will make sure things are clean : /

Marcelo