I'm totally new to N800 and OS2008 and want a good music and video player either one app or one for music and one for video. By the looks of it there seems to be 4 main ones:

Kagu
UKMP
Canola
Mplayer

Canola looks good but is a beta version so I'm a little put off. Kagu and UKMP look good but which one is best. Mplayer from what I've read can play a lot of video formats but can it be used for music and is it good.

Using the built in player for video it was struggling to play avi files and kept freezing. Any views on what to install and use.

Cheers

To tell you the truth, if you don't mind the bare-bones look/feel, the default maemo media player isn't bad.

I'm partial to UKMP, because it works closest to how other industry media players work -- it looks cool too. I think Kagu is a little more intuitive -- although, keep in mind that it's only an audio player at the moment -- but currently, you have to create playlists in order to play music (i.e., you can't just click on a song and play it). Also, Kagu has A2DP support.

And, one must also have MPlayer on-hand for those media files which nothing else plays.

Tim

I'd recommend you check out MediaBox:

http://mediabox.garage.maemo.org/

It's newish and there's clearly work still to be done, but so far I like it. It uses MPlayer for video playback, so you'll need that installed, but so far it seems pretty stable and it looks like there's a lot of promise.

cheers for the info guys, food for thought. Also is canola any good?

anyone know when/why mplayer doesn't play the videos produced by Nokia's Video Converter app??

Watch the video here:

http://www.maemoapps.com/2007/12/21/...and-wonderful/

-T.

Seriously, try them all. They seem to all be different enough to suit different tastes.

I prefer mplayer for video, and kagu for music. Kilikali is good if you want a simple audio player. I still check out the rest every now and then, to see what they've added/changed. My preferences will probably change in the future.

in terms of design aesthetics, they all look pretty amateurish/unprofessional. canola is the only professional looking app out there. so far. media box is aalright. but if you could care less about design and want something that works. just use the default player. or maybe mediabox.

I have downloaded the three most recent deb files. Each one install without error. When selected, MediaBox opens fills the screen and displays "Loading Components". It never does. It cannot be closed so I have to power off/on. Is anyone else having a similar problem? N800 w/OS2008.

same issue I'm experiencing.. just has the loading components screen for me. you don't have to power off though, just hit the back button on the face of the device and it will ask if you want to exit
I've got the required runtime of python2.5 and mplayer so I'm not sure what the issue is.