Announcing the initial test release of Open Video Player.

The purpose of Open Video Player:

Some users have expressed dismay at the lack of features in the stock video player. The purpose of Open Video Player is to provide the features that are lacking in the stock video player, whilst maintaining a similar look and feel. The fact that it is FOSS will of course make further improvements easier.

What additional features does it have?

Features that are currently implemented are:

1. Playback in background (optional): Continued playing of videos whilst browsing your collection or viewing the details of a video etc.

2. Playback whilst minimised (optional): Continued playing of videos whilst the application is minimised.

3. Support for auto-rotation, fixed landscape and fixed portrait modes.

4. You can add videos to the playback queue as well as play a single video.

5. Additional controls in the playback toolbar.

6. An option to use smaller thumbnails.

7. Sorting of videos by date (asc or desc) or title (asc or desc).

8. Theming options.

Other feature requests are welcome. That's the purpose of OVP.

Installing OVP will not change any settings regarding the stock video player. I have not changed any MIME-type associations. It works alongside the stock video player just as any other application.

Both the .deb package and the source code are available from https://projects.developer.nokia.com/ovp/wiki/Downloads

Some screenshots:





Demo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY9znLsRbSs

UPDATE: Version 0.0.4 now available

Changelog:

* Added option to lock to landscape orientation when viewing videos.
* Added optional marquee text in video delegates.
* Now using filenames rather than embedded titles for videos.
* Fixed error in displaying playlist video details.

Wow! Cool! I know one of the most anticipated features the stock player are missing is DLNA. So it would be cool if that was a possibility. Another idea would be to try make it as light as possible by giving it extensive plugin capability.

I saw another project where QR-codes where used to redirect playback from N950 to TV and then back again... that would be a cool feature to have.

Anyway.. love you work so far.

Thanks for your great work.

Which backend are you using? Could it be backported to Maemo?

Only for Harmattan and Nokia N9???

oh f..k yeah! you rock!!

Thanks this is awesome!!

OVP uses the QML Video component, which uses GStreamer for both Harmattan and Maemo5. It should work on Maemo5.

It should work on Maemo5, depending on the status of Freemantle Qt Components.

This is great news. Thanks for all this work.

What I would like you to concentrate on is the video playback and its usability around it. I don't think the metadata, video sharing etc is that important as that's already in the stock player. What I really want is a better video "player" for people who watch a lot of video files on their N9. (a fine example is actually the stock video player of SGS2 or the old 7" Galaxy Tab)

Such as:

1. Resume capability (maybe even multiple bookmarking support)

2. Easy seek/skip buttons for forward/back. (specific intervals such as 5 or 10 second etc) Even possibly using the physical volume buttons as forward and back of a specified interval. (and have touch volume control bar on the screen instead) This was sooooo handy with mplaer on N900 as it could use arrow keys for 10 seconds or 1 minute skips.

3. Smaller thumbnails so I can see more videos on the list at once. Like a grid of 2 columns and 4 rows etc.

4. Option of HW decoding or SW decoding. (e.g. via long press of video to get option to do SW decoding using mplayer etc)

5. Option to specify only a specific directory or directories for the videos. (like SiB in N900) and even option to include or exclude its subdirectories.

6. Brightness control within the player and to be able to lock it down independent of the system brightness level.

7. Child lock activated via power button. (this is one of my favorite features of stock video player on Samsung Android phones) Just tap power button while playing to make it unresponsive to any touch/swipe/volume keys until power button is tapped again to unlock)

1,2,5,7 are the real important ones for me.
Would make the N9 a much better video player. =)

This relates to the metadata issue. The stock video player already has resume capability, and I can implement this easily enough, but I'm currently having problems writing to the resumePosition attribute of a video's metadata. I have requested TrackerWriteAccess in the .aegis file, but the changes I make to the metadata don't take effect, although no errors are reported.

Easy to do, though it will require a larger toolbar to accomodate the additional buttons. I'm not sure how easy it will be to alter the behaviour of the hardware volume keys.

Easy to do. I have already implemented a grid for the landscape mode. Perhaps I could add a pinch gesture that will change the size of the thumbnails (or failing that an option in the menu).

I wouldn't know where to start with this, as I'm using the QML Video element to display the videos. It's very much a high-level API. There is very little control over the backend, let alone the ability to choose which backend to use.

Easy to do. I can add an option in the settings to enable a whitelist or blacklist of directories.

Should be doable. I'll need to look at the documentation for GStreamer.

I'm not sure about the N9, but on the N950 a tap of the power button locks the screen entirely. I don't know if it's possible to change this behaviour, but I would like to implement it. I haven't had much time to look into the hackability of the device, so I'll try to find out (unless someone else can provide the answer).