UK Media Player Community Release Candidate 3 out

If you thought iPhone had nice and smooth scrolling and had tested earlier release of ukmp, you must have felt a bit down afterwards. Is this all the device can do? Or is it just the coders messing up of things.

Fortunately it was my bad.

Smooth scrolling was probably like half a frame per second in the RC2, worse in the earlier ones. So, I decided to make some manual profiling on osx and found that one frame update in smooth scrolling took 0.0133 seconds. Wow, that's a lot for a dual core computer. Must be something wrong with the code. A little tinkering with the surface blitting flags and it was down to 0.0068. 2x improvement! I was stunned. Anything else I could do? Well, some more profiling and the next hot spot was found. Updating of the covers position (and some other random stuff related to that) on the screen was culprit of 0.003 secs. So, some tuning up and phew, a frame took only 0.0034 secs to render on osx. Quite an improvement from 0.013 to 0.003.


So, now I can honestly give you smooth scrolling on UKMP.

Other improvements are not so noticeable, such as improved sorting on all fronts, shuffle that works and tons of small fixes.

I can honestly say that this is worth the upgrade.

https://garage.maemo.org/frs/download.php/1286/Urho-Konttoris-MediaCenter-1.0RC3.deb

You'll need python for it to work. If you don't have it, fetch it from here:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/download.php/1182/python2.4-runtime.install

Oh, a word of warning: mp3s that have images in the id3 tags, seem to crash the player when played. Working on that still.

Theme Maker updated to support N800

I've just released a new theme maker version. It is available from:
TM_1.0_beta2.zip

It will produce themes that work on all nokia internet tablet devices and firmwares (N800 and 770). I had to drop support for background image for this version. It will come in some form in a near future release.

Notice that the template image size is a bit bigger than previously and the colors are now in the image itself, on the very right side of the image. For the colors, thanks goes to tigert and mdk who work at nokia. Give lots of kudos to them.

There is also an example theme that you can download and test, nuvotheme: download here.
NuvoTheme.deb
I think it's pretty sweet and I use it myself these days. It's nice and simple. And uses a font size that *I* like, which probably means it's too small for the most.

I'm also like *this* close to being able to support Bora template images that Nokia has created. But I'm missing the time to debug what is wrong in the current state of things.

Media Converter 1.42 update

After some feedback from folks and good tips, I updated the resolution settings for media converter just a little bit.

640x384 resolution is now set to 13 fps. It's a bit low, I know, but it doesn't drop frames. If you want to, just edit the resolutions txt and change the rate to 14 or 15.

I added a new resolution of 480x288. It's splendid looking and runs at 18 fps without frame drops. Thus, it's a very nice balance between good looking video and smooth playback.

Also, there is a wicked 800x480 resolution for mplayer users, mainly for those videos that need to look just picture perfect.

It seems that bit rate affects the default player a bit, thus you get a bit smoother playback at 512 kbps than at 768 kbps.


Download here:

MediaConverterLinux.zip
MediaConverterOSXPPC.zip
Media_Converter_Windows_1.42_setup.exe
MediaConverterOSXIntel.zip

Media Converter Optimized for N800

I finally installed the latest firmware to N800 a few days ago. Video Playback had been improved immensely for that release. Kudos to the Nokia team for making it happen. It's spendid!

Sadly, I noticed that video stretching no longer worked in the same manner as it used to work in the previous firmware and most of the videos encoded with Media Converter no longer worked on the new one. But this was nicely balanced by the fact that I noticed that resolution of 640x384 worked in the new firmware. While testing it later, I found that balance of roughly 14 fps on that resolution was pretty much perfect between frame drops and normal smooth playback. Thus - a new MC release.

I also settled on 768 kbps to be the best default (anyone care to comment on this), as the idea of using such a high resolution means you want a good image quality - and that can't be had on low bit rate.

For demonstrative purposes, I give you the following in 640x368 for N800:

30 sec clip from Oceans 13.
30 sec clip from Sunshine.

They are made on the optimized mode, thus the cropping. Optimized mode just looks so much better on N800 than the movie aspect 2.39.

Convinced?

Though so!

Download here for:
Windows
OSX PPC
Linux
OSX Intel


I Accidentally released first a version that didn't have the fps set correctly. Thus the latest version is 1.41 in garage.

UKMP Community RC2 out!

Phew!

I found almost two hours of free time to work on UK MP today. And going through the bugs in the RC1 was smooth sailing this time. Album navigation works now as it's supposed to (you can navigate the other albums while playing one. Press next button and it will play next song in the album that you were listening to ... Yeah, that wasn't the case before).

I also installed latest firmware to my N800 and found out some crash bugs from that, which I Naturally, fixed. Next, I got info from dev of coherence project on how to setup the volume in the app and tuned the + and - buttons to work for the volume. Immediately I noticed that it's missing some sort of graphical hint on what level it's currently on. Well, won't happen for 1.0 release.

All right. Is that it? Pretty much. I feel that UKMP is very much ready for prime time. So, grab it and run it. You shouldn't stumble on many bugs anymore. Oh, make sure you have network open if you need album artwork to be downloaded. It'll cache them, so it's a one time thing.

https://garage.maemo.org/frs/download.php/1224/Urho-Konttoris-MediaCenter-1.0RC2.deb

If you don't have python installed, grab python 2.4 form here:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/download.php/1182/python2.4-runtime.install

On a sadder note, I tried to install NuvoTheme on the device after flashing, but it wasn't installing. Oh well, some bug hunting to be done in the weekend.