Tuesday, July 24, 2007

UKMP 1.5 is out and it's looking sweet

Big thanks to Roope Rainisto from Nokia for helping out tune up the interface. The song list now sports thumb interface for selecting songs. Looks better too, have a look at it yourselves:


Another big thing that's been asked for is kinetic scrolling. After trying it out for a while, I am very impressed by it. Yeah, I know, here is another developer again boasting his ego, but I am not applauding myself for that. Kinetic scrolling is really sall thing to add technically once you have smooth scrolling anyway. But the thing I've been thinking about now is that Nokia should implement that same thing to the web browser. It would be so much better to use that to scroll around the page. Let's say you've read the article through. Wan't to go up to the beginning of the page? No probs, just flick the finger quickly and it will scroll to the top in a split sec. Want to scroll in a controllable fashion, scroll with your finger and stop it before raising it from the device surface.

One more thing I have forgotten to write about is that this version also supports wma files and might also support aac files as well as some bug fixes related to continuous playback.


You can download the latest version of UKMP and UKTUBE from here:
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/ukmp

and remember that you need to have python and mplayer installed. If you don't have them, install them first from here:
Python
mplayer

As always, you can check out the new features from the video below:

21 comments:

  1. Hey, that looks really nice, great work again. :) That type of scrolling is certainly something we are looking into.

    ReplyDelete
  2. looks nice, but the packaging is still broken. creates a /debian dir in the rootfs.

    ReplyDelete
  3. could you add 'pl.youtube' prefix into uktube?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous18:27

    really nice improvements!
    you're doing an amazing job on this app!

    i just have a question though...maybe i didn't find how, but is there a way to have a seek bar when it's playing an mp3? because i have some 1:30 hour mixes and i don't want to play it from the beginning each time??

    really nice work anyway!
    thanks

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous18:42

    I have os 2.2006-39-14 on my 770 and uktube works great, but Mediacenter (took me a while to figure out that was the program's name) requires pygame and ukmp says it installs fine without pygame being installed, but it seems to do nothing when I click on it in the menu. From x-term, I get the python error message about pygame - is it possible to either add pygame as a prerequisite (so it gets installed by app manager first automatically) or at least come up with a message window about what needs to be installed before ukmp will run? BTW, I've been using uktube for several versions now and that works fine, but the mediacenter part hasn't worked for several versions. I was too lazy before this to figure out why.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I will be adding a playing now screen that will have seek bar. It'll happen some time in the future. In the meanwhile, you can fast forward with dpad right and rewind with dpad left by keeping the key pressed.

    pygame hasn't been included, as the enduser python packages include pygame as well. Anyway, I'll try to add the prequisite of pygame for the future versions.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anonymous12:01

    Nice work, konttori! Will support for other languages be included in the future? What are your plans for that?

    ReplyDelete
  8. What do you mean by other languages? Do you mean the few text lines that appear in the user interface? Or other alphabets?

    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous13:41

    Thank you ! This player rocks.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Anonymous15:02

    I was refering to the id3 tags. It has problems displaying tags with east asian languages. Nokia's own media player is unable to do so too, so, it might not be something on your part.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Anonymous15:35

    My wet dream is kinetic movements for browsing....pleeez

    ReplyDelete
  12. Problem with id3 tags is that pygame that ukmp uses for all graphics seems to not include the asian/other alphabet font support (even if you try to use asian fonts). I have tested it quite a bit on the python 2.4 install and asian font rendering just didn't work. Considering that python 2.5 install pack seems to have roughly the same pygame version, asian stuff is just out of reach for a while.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Anonymous03:39

    For me the kinetic scrolling is not working; otherwise the 1.5 is working asit should. Where could be the.problem?

    ReplyDelete
  14. Anonymous16:33

    First off, I've been using the new ukmp 1.5 for a couple of days now and I am loving the kinetic scrolling. Earlier today I thought of something which could improve on the player fairly easily. Since i like to leave my n800 in my pocket I find that I always locking and unlocking the touchscreen. The only problem is, if i locked the tablet while i was in track view then the 'touch screen and keys active' dialog that appears in the top right hand corner of the screen blocks the albums button for about 2 seconds. Normally when i unlock the tablet it is because i want to change the song and so this slows me down. The two easiest ways i can think of to fix this are either to reposition the button to the bottom left or to make the button larger so that it can still be pressed even when the dialog is up. I apologise because of how nitpicky this comment is however, I think that it will improve the experience for everyone. Thank you Konttori for your hard work!

    ReplyDelete
  15. Anonymous18:43

    I just found another dependency, but I installed it manually and finally got ukmp to run. Hooray. I had to do it from the command-line to find the problem. UKMP requires python2.5-gstreamer (or the python2.4 version). This is on a fresh install of os2006, otherwise I would have had it installed anyway. Just thought it'd be a good prerequisite for the .deb, too.

    Thanks for the media player / youtube downloader/viewer, Konttori! Now I just gotta figure out the controls.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Anonymous18:54

    I ran Mediacenter from xterm and top tells me that xterm is using 63% of the cpu time and Mediacenter only 13%. I used the home-button to get back to xterm to see what it was doing and it's outputting printf's for (I'm guessing) the number of seconds decoded so far, but too many per second (once per second would still be useful as a debug/status thing, but wouldn't use up all the cpu time). It doesn't matter, of course, since most people won't start it from xterm and it'll quickly go to /dev/null. Even with the slowdown, my 770 doesn't skip while playing. Just FYI.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Anonymous21:43

    Ukmp 1.5 works very well on my 770, but uktube still fails. I am even unable to have a looke at the interface. By the way, how can I adjust the volume when full screen?

    Anyway, good job.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Press + or - keys to increase /decrease volume. It's by default at 100% volume. You need to change master volume beforehand if you want to have greater volume.

    If uktube fails, try patching your python to the latest version.

    Also, open xterm and write uktube
    then press enter.
    It should give you the reason why uktube fails to open on your device.

    ReplyDelete
  19. I just installed 1.5 and UKTube and frankly, I don't understand why everybody waxes so lyrically about this program. To me, it doesn't work at all.

    The interface is visually attractive, but the responsiveness is complete bollocks: Hitting a button gives completely unpredictable results (sometimes a song starts playing, sometimes the screen reverses to showing something else, sometimes nothing happens at all).

    The video playback doesn't seem to work at all, or some random music starts playing. Also, the one line caption is not enough to make out what file I'm selecting (a moot point anyway, since I cannot play anything).

    There is no exit button at all in the interface! What's up with that? Are you seriously thinking I was going to leave it running all the time?

    I installed this player, hoping it would be a suitable replacement for the Kilikali audio player and the minimalist mplayer frontend, but if it doesn't work, there's little point in it now, is it?

    All this on a N800 with second-to-last firmware and a complete installation of Python 2.5.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Anonymous09:00

    For me the kinetic scrolling is not working too. The Rest is fine. Any idea where could be the problem?

    ReplyDelete
  21. very nice app ... but something does not work for me ... and i don’t know why... the scrolling is not working...

    ReplyDelete