Notices

Wanted to use Linux, but not MythTV. Too big of a headache. I love Media Center, but looking to ditch Windows again...

You can capture streams with UNIX pipes, MPlayer, and 101 dvb utilities.

You don't want 10 video players because fragmentation is a Bad Thing. Even _if_ you're OK with that, you don't want too much double/triple work. Which is why you want a modular design.

Which is precisely the problem with everything in one monolithic application: 1) bloat 2) others cannot reuse 3) when you don't want to use that application you're fscked.

Now, Totem isn't good with DVB. It can't scan the channels. So you need to do that manually. Kaffeine however, has this well integrated in GUI. So on GNOME, we wait for GNOME DVBD to mature... which has Totem integration.

As for the set top boxes in France by Free: either its proprietary crap or it uses an open protocol which means other media players also can read (and hence capture) from it.

i dont know why some people dont like VLC, but for me this is great news....having VLC officialy on Maemo 5 with some extra codecs here and there (for some mkv files/subs/audio) and we are set to go...will be great!

will it play 720p too?

OK, allnameswereout, you win : VLC is crap, Free is crap, France is crap, etc. No problem. With your permission I'll continue using VLC on my Freebox to watch French TV, just because it works for me, but I promise I won't tell anybody else, ever.

I said nothing about France nor Free, I say VLC is overrated and what is needed is either improvement of Nokia's proprietary media player to include more formats or a good open source media player UI which supports current libraries and abstraction layers.

For MKV all you need in GStreamer is libgstmatroska.so.

Capturing of streams is nothing special. I did that with MPlayer in 2003 although I had to compile it myself to get RTSP support. I've also done capturing on over DVB-S on cheap PPC Linux DVR in what was it 2001 or something. On Linux this is really nothing special.

Either these French Free STBs use a proprietary protocol and suck, or they use an open one and therefore its easy to write your own script or backend. In any case the support for such should be done via a library, or a config file.

What sucks on GNOME is that there is no support for scanning (and more, like EPG) using DVB-? so before you got your channels you need to use a CLI utility (or Kaffeine). Fortunately, DVBDaemon is being developed for GNOME, and it has a Totem backend. This is the right way: writing a backend for the specific media player. For example, another media player like VideoLAN Client, MPlayer, Exaile, or whatever could then also support these features easily.

GStreamer is also not a GNOME application, and neither is PulseAudio, nor is DBus. See, you want everything modular and use abstraction layers. Doing so, the end result is that each UI only has its own GUI backend (CLI, Ncurses, GTK, Qt, Cocoa, Win32, ...). This means maximum code reusage for your other media player (or any program for that matter) uses the same libraries. Imagine every application shipping its own libc or its own mp3 library. Or all compiled static. Utter madness! And very much the same thing as going on here, except that its hypothetic one.

So instead of yet another bloated media player, or yet another media player with a **** UI not optimized for N900/Fremantle, its far more useful to use available libraries and get these supported in a media player which _does_ have a UI optimized for N900/Fremantle.

And if you think 2844798142191451 choice is good go spend a day on Walmart without knowing wtf you need. Cause that is how a newbie experiences choice; overwhelming. It is a common complaint about the tons of Linux distributions available, and it is partly valid (each does have +/-, and many are specialized in something, but there is also a lot of overlapping and double work.).

This lowers the signal-to-noise ratio, and makes it harder to find projects which actually _matter_. Imagine one unique project in Multimedia subcategory. The more other projects in this subcategory, the less chance it has to be spotted.

The very complaint we also hear about iPhoneOS with their 4959501 fart apps and other nonsense (while there is for example no erotic content to be found, and for example no alternative rendering engine like Gecko).

So, no, it isn't a good thing to get RealPlayer, Helix Player, VLC, MPlayer, Totem, QuickTime, Windows Media Player, Exaile, Songbird, Xine, XMMS2, and all the other stuff in Multimedia subcategory. The only interesting stuff from this list is libraries from RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, and QuickTime. Those we want in /usr/lib, and we want them native, debianized, and legal. Then our media player can play such files. Which... is what Fluendo and/or Nokia did because some of these codecs got ported to Maemo 5 (with patent license paid).

Nice to hear that VLC gets official. I use piiptv to stream TV to my phone. Was looking 4 a way to get it on the N900. VLC saved me the day...The Webui has a streambutton 4 VLC ^^

So without ever looking at the iPhone app store I don't know- do they have over 75,000 different apps that do entirely different things?

Whoa, if that's the case, then I'm leaning towards allnameswereout.

But really, if all we look at IS the fact that "Hey, the N900's getting noticed", then we should be happy no matter what player anyone chooses to use/not use. And for those who have the knowledge and ability to help make suggestions/steer 3rd party devs in the right direction, feel free to do so, because your audience is them, not us.

@allnameswereout I do value your statements, in this and every other thread. I follow your point enough to see its validity. I agree that the more codecs we can access (through legal libs) the better any player, default/included or anything anyone else cares to build.

As for the Walmart comment, all I can say is: http://www.peopleofwalmart.com

Sorry, I want both options (libraries and VLC) and then I can choose the best (for me).

I don't believe if a best option than VLC exists will be lost in between too many options.

EDIT: I almost forgot; GREAT NEWS..

Well spoken as someone that is interested in keeping things nice and neat in the back end. However, as users we find many things in VLC that make it superior to other players. And, no, it is not just the interface. Well, I take it back. I don't know enough about gstreamer and other back end libraries to say for sure. Maybe the capabilities have already been created and no interface for them exist yet. But, for example, some of the things I enjoy about VLC, besides being able to play just about anything I throw at it very well, are things like being able to advance video frame by frame, being able to synchronize audio and video on files where they are not, etc. So, until other, more kosher, players match VLC in quality and features, you'll have to forgive the users for rejoicing about its availability.

At least on a PC, VLC plays more videos than any other app I have tried and does not consume much resources, but that is with a Q8200, 6gigs ddr3 and a Nvidia 9800.

VLC on a phone. Wild.