Notices

I think the Diablo version of media player sucks. Why? Because it periodically disconnects from the stream, even with great wireless connectivity. The Chinook version didn't. I can run mplayer streams for hours...latest test was over 12, with no interruption.

While on the subject of suckage, there are two other pet peeves:

. it doesn't RETRY if it, for some reason, loses. Incredible that this is a "feature"

. sometimes, if it loses a connection, you can't reconnect unless you REBOOT. Admittedly, I've not dug to find if there's other things that can be done other than rebooting

. it takes FOREVER to buffer some streams. It'll take 30 seconds, for instance, to buffer something that mplayer will take <5 seconds to buffer. Unacceptable

This is on an N800, by the way.

Don't get me wrong. Overall, I really like Maemo. But geez, this piece of software really isn't up to snuff...perhaps snuffed it should be.

Bob

Wow, I've never had any of these issues before. Can't say I blame you for complaining.

I have the same issues, however complaining about the built-in applications is futile, so I either live with the problems or use a 3rd party application.

I have to say that Media player for me is pretty good with Radio streams, managing to play most of what I have chucked at it - most definately less fussy than Canola, which is my choice for ease of use, especially in-car.

I actually like the interface of media player, except the lack of album art, especially for in car use.

However it's performance sucks massively. It is really unresponsive and frequently just seems to freeze, when it is sucking very possible cpu cycle the tablet can chuck at it, and is still hungry for more. Possibly it's because I have several thousand Mp3 files on there.

My simple answer is this. Mplayer for movies, Canola for audio, and leave it at that.

Also, the real problem here is most likely gstreamer and its sinks and perhaps not Nokia's Media Player.

I always really really hated when a streaming program will not attempt to reconnect indefinetely to a stream (or at least give the user an option to specify that).
I like the media player interface, and the fact that there are so many radio stations you can chose from, and add your own. But the fact that it will prompt the user to retry to reconnect sucks.
For example, I go in the garden and do some work, while listening to BBC. Then, because of the weak wifi signal sometimes I get disconnected. And my fingers are all dirty and I really don't enjoy going to where I left my device just to press OK.

P.S. BTW, is the media player open source? I'd liek to take a look at how it does things and make some improvements.

No, the media player is not open source though there is already a push to make it so.

I thought so, I looked for the sources and couldn't find anything :/
Well, it would be really, really nice if they open source it, it is the best radio player program on any OS, it does almost everything I want except for those issues which can be fixed if we had the source code.
I'd love to see a desktop port for it.

nice of you to offer help to fix this streaming reconnection issue....