I would have to add my vote for MediaBox Media Center.
I have a few movies that play well with MPlayer and others that need Media Player to play properly.
MediaBox plays all of them perfectly.
I can't say that for any of the other eye candy players.
They seem to pick one player and use it exclusively.
MediaBox seems to know which player to use for each file.

Without question, Mplayer is by far and away the best player for videos out there. I have loads of DVDs ripped to xvid at between 1gb and 1.5gb, and it just starts to struggle with the highest quality ones. I like that fact that it is full screen, with the control interface as an osd, instead of you having to drop back out of full screen to control it.

I agree with the comment about Canola having too many levels on it's menus. what really kills me though is haveing to navigate all the way back up to exit. That seems to be something Mediabox has nailed down really well, although as I have said it's no good to me as there is no shuffle yet.

Gaz

First, a question: After installing MediaBox, movie files encoded using the Nokia IT Video Converter no longer work properly. They stutter and barely play at all. This happens in MediaBox and Canola2, and thus I suspect has something to do with MPlayer itself (mplayer was installed along with mediabox). Any suggestions? If I uninstall MPlayer, will MediaBox still work?

Second, my thoughts on the players. I'm a newbie N800 owner, but long-time ITT lurker. Since I installed Canola earliest, most of my comments are related to it rather than the other players.

**Canola2**
Likes:
-Photo viewer
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. The kinetic scrolling (left/right) in the album view is a little slow, but visually this view is very appealing.
-Podcast downloading
Perhaps there is another podcatcher for OS2008 that I don't know about, but I love that Canola has this feature. It also pulls the name of the show and episode, too, which keeps things easier to organize and sift through. The process of setting up the feeds is a little tedious, but not horrendous. It would be nice if it would automatically download new episodes, but for now, I'm satisfied just manually downloading them.
-Volume control
This is something Canola shares with the default Media Player, but does it even better, since in Canola the volume control is always visible. 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.
-Finger-friendliness
I can easily leave the stylus in the tablet with Canola, since everything is designed for finger use. Actually, this is pretty true with the default Media Player as well.
-Eye candy
Canola is just visually stunning. Icons, themes, etc. are very attractive.

Gripes:
-Exiting takes too many steps (as others have also commented)
-No FM Radio (not a necessity, but MediaBox has it)
-There are two steps to get to the list of videos, even though the second step only has one option. Perhaps there will be more options here in the future.

**MediaBox**
Likes:
-Dock-style interface
The dock-style interface makes jumping between media types very easy.
-Kinetic scrolling
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...


Gripes:
-Seems to take a long time every launch to find media. (more than Canola, at least)
-When a track or video is playing, the controls are hidden. You have to actively switch to view them by clicking on the arrow.
-No volume control on screen
-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)
-Media file thumbnails aren't clickable. I kept trying to click on the thumbnails themselves, instead of the very small triangle play buttons. This might be a design compromise to make the kinetic scrolling better, but I think it is something that needs to be weighed.
-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.


Since MPlayer doesn't seem to play my movie files, I haven't really been able to fully review MediaBox's video playback features. One thing I did notice when playing the .avi N810 promo that came on the device is that it is kind of hard to get to a particular spot if the video by clicking on the time bar. Canola definitely beats MediaBox there.

It will start but will complain about not finding mplayer. It can still be used for FM radio and images, though.

Yeah, Canola2's photo viewer is awesome! Kudos to the Canola guys!

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.

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.

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.

It takes most time for loading the thumbnails and writing the captions. I fully agree that this has to speed up.

Screen estate is limited and I found this to be the best way to do it. But I'm open to better suggestions.

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.

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.

QUOTE: It takes most time for loading the thumbnails and writing the captions. I fully agree that this has to speed up. QUOTE

Perhaps a minor inconvenience to most users but a big one to me is the fact that the space for captions under the thumbnails is so limited that not enough text is permitted to truly identify the album titles. If I have an album titled "Mahler - Symphony No. 3," the symphony number and even part of the word "Symphony" aren't included. Therefore not a very useful designation for identifying and choosing the album.

I tried Nokias video converter and you are right. MediaBox doesn't seem to know what to do with mp4 files. It chokes (as does MPlayer).
Personally, I play AVI's and have no problem at all.
I agree that it is something that they should fix though. Media Player plays mp4's just fine. It might be something as easy as pointing to Media Player to play the mp4's instead of MPlayer.
I shouldn't really say that it is easy to do that though, I have no idea how complicated it might be.

I have installed mediabox, but it cannot work: selected it at menu, then, "mediabox loading...", finally, nothing happen.

My system is OS2008 on N800.

Who know how to correct this problem?

Please run X Terminal and enter
MediaBox
Then press return and wait for any error message to show up. This may help us finding the problem.

Mediabox is my choice! The biggest thing to me is that it can handle folders as an albums - old school. For example, I created a folder named Mix where I copy ,say, hundred songs from different albums/artists. And Mediabox shows it as aMix album, not as 100 different albums/artists.
The bad piece - it does not recognize non-Unicode(or Unicode?) russian tags - shows them as ??????.

Re Mediabox. Am I missing something obvious or is there no way to pause video from full screen mode?? Especially ironic because there is a way to unpause (volume keys).