UK Media Player is nearing first public release

I've been trying to fix all those zillion bugs found in UK Media Player preview versions 1 through 14.

Now I'm no longer hearing reports. I don't know whether that is a good thing or a bad thing.

What I do know, is that the most popular version is still preview 9 with 305 downloads, while the latest version, 14, is not that far behind with 194 downloads. The versions have been changing so quickly that I don't wonder at all that not all people have the time (or even have noticed) that a newer versions have shipped each day (well, more like twice or three times a day).

I just released preview version 16. It includes Shuffle functionality. It's not a fully working shuffle, although not far from it - next version will include fully working shuffle. Anyway, have a look at the current layout (yeah, Arctic Monkeys totally rock - buy their album now!):




Shuffle icon is a bit too big at the moment, I'll scale it down a bit in the future and maybe move it to a different place. I tried to make it nicely big so that it would be easy to press with a finger. But even a slightly smaller one would probably do.

By the way, did you know that you can use arrow up and down in both views. In album list view (the one with many albums), it scrolls down a line of albums and in the album contents view, it moves do display the songs of the next album. Oh, and left and right arrows move to next / previous song and middle button is play/pause. Top + and - buttons will control volume once I get that working. Full screen button does what it's supposed to do.

Anyway, for those interested in roadmaps, here is my intended schedule, which may be overly cautions, but it's better that way than the other way around.
- shuffle (this weekend - final fixes)
- Release 1.0 final (next week)
- volume control (within a week - if someone helps me with gstreamer calls for this)
- Chinese letter support (within a week - if possible easily)
- experimental ogg support (within two weeks)
- Party list (within two weeks - man, I'd love to have this sooner)
- Play lists (within a month)
- upnp support (experimental within a month)

Bugs are welcome to garage project:
https://garage.maemo.org/projects/mediaconverter/

New Media player for N800 / IT 770

I have finally decided that my media player is ready to emerge from the darkness. It's been bit of an under the radar project, as I've only had the time every once in a while to dedicate to it. Nevertheless, I am quite pleased on how it turned out. I call it for now UK-MP (Urho Konttoris Media Player), but that may change.

Here, have a look at these two screenshots:



As you can see, the interface itself is pretty simple. I've emphasized visual aspecs, ease of use and touch screen navigation on the interface design.

On the album view, you can see a list of all albums on MMC1 and MMC2 on your device. You can use rocker up and down to scroll the list up and down. Also, you can use dragging the screen with your finger to scroll up and down. It's not quite something I'd call smooth scrolling, but I'm pretty sure I can get it to run about twice as fast as it's running now, which should provide an almost smooth scroll. Albums are sorted by artist and the album cover (or something related to the artist and cd) is retrieved from the net. Artist name is displayed in the dcs reflection (yeah, how cool is that reflection. Mind you, it's the cause of the long startup time - but well worth it!). SOng count is displayed in the top right corner of the cd.

Ok, click on any of the albums to see the songs in the album. Album name and artist is diplayed on the left along with the cd cover. There is a back-to-list button at the top rigt of the view. You can always use the fullscreen button to switch to the fullscreen mode (which is preferred mode). Click on any song to start playing. You can use rocker left to go to previous song and rocker right to go to next song. Rocker functions work in album list view as well. Middle button toggles pause/play.

Convinced that you want to try it out? Cool.

You need to have python installed on your device before you install!

For some reason the python 2.5 install seems to elude me. This link MAY work on N800: http://repository.maemo.org/extras/dists/bora/install/python2.5-runtime.install

For those who have trouble installing it, do this:
Open "Application Menu"->"Tools"->"Application Manager"
In the main menu choose "Tools"->"Application catalogue..."
Click in "New" button
Enter:
Web address: http://repository.maemo.org
Distribution: mistral
Components: free non-free

All right. Now, go to install list and select python-2.4.

Install.

Once you have Python, you just need the media player.

Latest version can be downloaded from here:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/?group_id=234


And you are done.

Comments, bug reports and such are welcome in:
urho.konttori@gmail.com
as well as comments section of this blog.

UPDATE!
Latest version can be found here:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/?group_id=234