Notices

Hi Marcelo, I was just trying to look at c1 and c2 from a user's perspective.
Featurewise, c1 was already pretty complete and had working upnp support. I liked it a lot.
You're right that things need to evolve, but IMHO c2 became really heavy for the tablets. I like the fact that you still test your software on the 770 (I do the same with MediaBox), but maybe these tests can be used as a basis for a little more optimizations? All tablet versions can benefit from that.
The 770 makes you realize bottlenecks and extensive memory usage very well. And even though my 770 is almost 3 years old, I'm still using it for weather forecast and media playing (it got a nice place in the kitchen).
Just my 2 cents.

@OVK

I am using no more my trusty old 770 due to a WSOD, but no problem with Navicore/Wayfinder. You can use the same original key for both apps, just unregister Navicore before flashing the tablet.
I used Wayfinder in OS2008 before going back to OS2007 (for Gene Cash's apps) without problems on my N800, after been having used regularly Navicore on OS2007HE on the 770

@Handful
thx for the great app. Sometimes my girlfriend succeed in crashing Canola (she uses it a lot more than me) but until now I never had suuccess in reproducing some bugs...

@Pycage yeah dude, you are right. We had the "felling" that canola2 was going to be heavy, and actually a lot of UI was cut to make it faster. We know how to improve some of the biggest bottlenecks and that's our focus now I'm "refusing" any new version (going to do them only with students) and focusing on optimizations in several areas.

For example: SimpleGrid will finally come. We indeed choosed the comestic way of the proportional thumbs but them the perfomance price is too high. Now that we did "all" planned features (ok, missing fm radio and the video podcast - both ready just needing final tweaks) our focus would be on running several optmizations in several fronts:

a. Simple GRID : faster scroll for pictures (2 rows only) faster loading of less thumbnails etc

b. A full test-suite for light media scanner, to make sure a lot of test is done with a huge user-contributed database of files from everywhere (so we don't face problems with encondings etc

c. LibXine : this backend would allow us to : improve the speed between tracks, do a real gapless playback and even cross-fade for music / audio. Of course this would cost something for the user, so an easy easy way to switch etc.

d. Atabake (the media engine), there's a couple of things that we know we can improve now with less risk. The time constraint is to make sure the 770 problems are simple to workaround also. also to reduce loading time between 2 files in media engine (we did a lot of suggestion to the maemo theme, we are specting a lot of good news)

e. Upnp : this needs no explanation

f. podcast : improve parser speed (specially in all feeds screen) and of course optimize memory usage in the download manager

g. Several speed improvements on EDJE/EVAS bindings etc, for example we found out that we can speed up even more the loading time, do some caching for the theme improvements, some improvements on the lazy lists, scrolling was already improved, but still need work (how to draw less ) ?

h. more and more refactoring in several places that now can be done better

j. Some improvements on user feedback (make the screen more responsive on really heavy actions : like downloading 10k list from upnp)

So, I think we planned a little later (we thought that the n810 would be better hardware) in this caught us by surprise (same hardware, same tearing) but as you probably know we are a company, and canola was a great experiment and the "money" we get from the users is the experience, to understand what we can / cannot do and how fast (dev time) so we use Canola's framework for several projects and for this (not the canola UI) it has shown extremely successful, so much that we were able to keep working on canola with a (flexible in size) but reasonable good amount of people.

we were surprised by how the UI things run on the 770 (actually a lot better than in the n800 because no tearing) but the other bootlenecks are more related to really older dbus versions (we have versions with custom dbus etc that runs really better) but things like (memory access - that you probably suffered a lot like us - ) are really sad : / but we need to deal with that right : )

The problem was more things like : based on users feedback on Canola1, we knew that they wanted more than we could do with a simple sdl application so we paid the price not for the eye candy, but for flexibility.

I will now pray for a better hardware ))))))))) but, if this comes we will not "jump" and do a canola3 doing the same kind of "experimental evolution". We will keep it more or less like it is, just improve the framework stability / API.

Thanks for the time you took to write to us

Marcelo

Hi Kalid :

We will try to setup a library with files like you described (wrong name for artists) but this is really hard (of course we can try to do a "did you mean" thing, but without a database it's REALLY complicated. We are not a search engine like google to be able to suggest, and if amazon doesn't it's complicated for us.

Anyhow it's quite strange that it found it when downloading 1 by 1. I will ask again, to see if we can change the % for the actual album that is trying to find the cover. I think it probably has different time outs when its complete download and single-album downloading, and this "fallback" make it work.

Also, if you don't have the covers from download... you can always save the file. Anyways, I placed as student project the creation of more "sources" or regional sources. I think for exampel a google image source can help.

But it's indeed far from perfect : / Can you please do testing with other media applications that downloads the cover? to see if it's a canola mistake or the default return from the used sources (amazon or last. fm ) ?

About the startup, can you help us with more data?

a. Do you have big cards? the updating media library, can easily take the 1 minute if you have more than 8gigas. We are actually not "scanning" for files but just making sure that all the files on the library are actually there. I asked the devs.. to add an option to remove that, but you will face "errors" file not found if you don't refresh your library after some change (this makes things more manual) but indeed speed up quite nicely the boot time.

I have a couple of devices, I didn't faced this slows down on loading, even more on the 2008 devices. It can be that one file may be "hooking" the lms, :/ we need to investigate : /

I think this "incosistency load lazyness" can be that in the other time canola is not trying to scan again.. but if you help us reproduce it this is something we would really like to find and fix the error.

@mwiktowy

then it's a bug :/ we will investigate


@ mtron

No, Canola2 is not opensource but we indeed are mentoring a couple of projects related to BlueZ (the bluetooth stack for linux) because some of our developers are key developers on blueZ and 4 or 5 students are being mentored by us

Br

Marcelo

@handful
Wow, that was a good insight into development.
Indeed, memory consumption is my biggest trouble, but its an exciting challenge.
I'm looking forward to your libxine bindings.

Hi -

I don't think I saw this anywhere but the stand alone video thumbnail app seemed to grab frames well into videos that made for interesting thumbnaails. The plug-in seems to grab frames very early in the video so they are often showing something from the credits or studio icon. In the case of multiple episodes of a TV series, all of the thumbnails look the same, that is they're not differentiated like they had been in the stand alone.

Not a big deal. Not a bug. Just an observation.

Thank you,
Frank

@FGol, I think the code is the same (it generates a random number from 15-X and then grabs one frame in this space ..
.
but do the following when playing the video, press options, save thumbnail in the frame that you prefer. I think sometimes the menu passes behind the video but the video will be paused anyway

Hope this helps!

Marcelo

Outstanding Thank you!

Frank

Marcelo:

It would be helpful if there was a sticky post of improvements we will likely see in the final version. Maybe ordered from likely to less likely.

I've borrowed my friend's iPod Touch to see what features it has that I would want in Canola. There are really only two Touch features I would really like to have in Canola: 1) A-Z slider on the Artist, Album, Cover Art and Songs list; and 2) Cover art thumbnail on the Album list.

Any chance we'll see these two features in the final release?

Hi Marcelo,

I wouldn't consider it a bug if canola fails to find a cover because of slight misspelling in ID3 tags or because the sources it uses for cover download do not happen to have cover art for some albums. A failure to download cover would be the expected behavior. Just that the failure to find covers for a few albums should not stop it from downloading covert art for albums it indeed can find cover art for. I tried Kagu. Kagu failed to download most covers but it did not hang. I must say I haven't had good luck downloading cover art with kagu before. I added another album for which I verified that cover art exists on last.fm. I then went through Settings -> Media Library -> Cover arts and thumbnails - > Update cover arts, and it did download cover for this one album. So it seems since I updated cover art one by one for all albums, update cover art for all albums seems to be working better.

I have two 8GB cards. Normal startup time for canola is typically 3-5 seconds which is plenty fast. This morning it hung again at "Updating media library". I finally killed it after 40 minutes of being hung in that state. The little rotating circle showing activity was still going after 40 minutes. Since canola does start up in 3-5 seconds most of the time for me, I am guessing it is not the card size issue.

Let me know what I can do to help. In case one of the other libraries I might have installed might be causing a problem here, I can try removing folders one at a time to see if removing a folder causes the problem to go away. Since this problem is intermittent, it might take a while to determine if removing a folder did indeed cause the problem to go away. I can also look into putting together an SD card with my current music on it and if that SD card is enough to reproduce the problem, I can send it to you, although I have a suspicion it is my environment that is causing the problem as opposed to my mp3 files., considering no one else has complained about it