UKTUBE - smooth playback of youtube files

I was talking to a few Nokia guys some time ago and they asked what was the single thing I would change for the tablet immediately. I said: make a proper D-pad (direction pad). Get one from the n-gage team. They said, yeah, but software wise. I thought for a while and said: calendaring / PIM. Almost every review complains about that.

But now, after a few weeks from that, I've been thinking again. Nope, the answer is playable youtube. Make the device web 2.0 compliant. It has to be able to play youtube movies smooth as silk. That's just the way it goes these days. Jittery playback is not an option.

So, yesterday I though - well, if no-one has made that app so far, no-one probably will. That is, unless I do it. So, I scanned the net a bit for youtube info, got some scripts to start the project and had a working application that plays smoothly youtube clips in fullscreen.

Then I went to bed.

Now, I put two hours more and the user interface is adequate for end user use and I've packaged the program as part of ukmp 1.3. Why part of? I didn't have the time to make a separate package. It's holiday time, midsummers fest is about to begin.

All right, so what do you need?
Python (as ever)
mplayer
ukmp-1.3-uktube

So, how does the app work?

Go to a youtube page.
Copy the url of the page.
Open uktube

paste the url to a field.

Press Play clip (only once, even if the app may seem to stall).
In a short while, it'll tell you the download size and progress. Once download is complete, it'll use mplayer to play the clip.




Files are stored on MMC1 in the root, so you need to have the front panel SD /MMC inserted.
On the very bright side, the files can be player later on as well from mplayer.

UPDATE:
I just added a youtube video that demonstrates how it functions. Have a look at it.

EDIT: ALSO WORKS ON 770!

UKMP 1.3

Another wednesday, another release of UKMP.

Major features in this release are: faster startup and delete song functionality. 1.3 uses a database file that is stored in covers directory. Basically what it contains is the id3 data of mp3 songs on your system. By using this file, ukmp doesn't have to scan all your mp3 files on startup. It'll just check which files you have on your system, then retrieve them from db or from id tags if it doesn't have them on the db. On my music library of around 400 songs, this dropped mmc scanning from 21 secs to around 3 secs. Nice improvement, huh?

Delete song is just that, delete. You enable it by pressing the mode toggle. First switch is party mode, second is delete songs mode. Once you are in delete song mode, just click on a song in the song list and it'll delete it.

This version fixes a few bugs from previous versions, most notably the cover.jpg bug.

Download from here:
http://downloads.maemo.org/product/ukmp/

as always, you need to have python installed. Install python from here:
Pymaemo

As always, here is a video that demonstrates the new functionality (also shows the light theme).

UKMP 1.2

It's Wednesday and as promised, I'm launching UKMP 1.2.

The major reason why you should upgrade to this version is party mode.
WTF.
Party mode is basically a queue of the songs you want to be played next.

Let me demostrate to you.

Install 1.2
Open UKMP.
Click on any album of yours.
Looks a bit like this:

At least if you chose Norah Joneses new album (very good - highly recommended).
Ok, what's new in this picture. You see on the right a button: Continuous mode. Click on that and it will switch to party mode. Now, click on a few songs and after each click the song you clicked will get a play order number at the end of the song name. Like this:


Also, the button will tell you that the queue size is at the moment 8. All right, I also chose songs from another album in the mix. Yes, you can switch back to cover list, click on another album, choose songs from there, add them to the mix and in a few minutes you have DJd yourself a sweet mix of music and you are ready to transform and roll out ( - if you are a transformer - if not, maybe just take your n800 to your car and don't worry about clicking while driving. It's dangerous. Just listen to your set of relaxing and antistressing tunes while driving in the traffic).

And that's not all. There's also support for using your existing collection of cover images. It works the same way as canola. Just put a cover.jpg a folder containing mp3 files. It will then default to that image for all albums in that folder.

Also, by popular reques (yeah. I requested it myself), UKMP will skip any folders titled: Maps. This improves living besides maemo mapper.

And last but not least, accidental clicks in cover view are now handled a bit better.

I may post up a video demonstration tomorrow.

Ahh... The links.

Remember, you need to have python installed. If you don't have it, you can install it from here:
http://pymaemo.garage.maemo.org/installation.html

And UKMP you can install from here:
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/ukmp

If you need ogg support, you can install ogg to your device from here:
http://ogg.garage.maemo.org/ogg-support.install

I was able to make a quick one take video and put it on youtube. It demonstrates the functionality in a quick manner. I wish I had the time to make these things in a proper manner.

Theme Maker 1.0 Ready

I took some time to get the theme maker to a 1.0 condition.

Great things about this 1.0 compared to previous betas:

1. Colors are embedded in the image itself
2. Full set of buttons and widgets (well... almost)
   
3. User customizable postinst and prerm
4. You can make a black theme

Here's proof of the 4 th improvement:

Cool, eh?

While testing the 'blackness', I also made a NuvoBlack theme as pictured above.

For part two, I give you keyboards from theme NuvoPearl:



And don't worry, the theme template hasn't become any bigger or more complicated than in previous versions. I also included both NuvoPearl and NuvoBlack as template images, so that you can easily modify them to make your own theme. Seriously, making a theme takes fifteen minutes if you use those templates as a basis.

Download theme maker and NuvoBlack /NuvoPearl from here: Garage
Please Note that installing NuvoBlack / Pearl will change some of your icons as well. They won't change until you reboot. Uninstalling theme will put back the original icons.

Lastly, to try to get more people to create exciting themes, I put together a two minute tutorial to theming and uploaded it to youtube. Have a look, it's really simple. Sorry for not narrating the tutorial. I hope it's self explanatory even without it.




Oh, and in case anyone of you needs to take screenshots on your N800, the only screenshot utility I found that works is gnuites:
load-applet-run_0.4.3-2_armel.deb

Bear in mind that you have to go to control panel to add the applet to your toolbar.

UKMP 1.1

Usually 1.0 versions need a quick 1.01 version. Quite surprisingly this was not the case for UKMP release. I didn't receive a single critical bug report. One seemingly annoying bug that was reported was that some people didn't have much luck with the album cover downloads. This has now been greatly improved for the 1.1 version. Yes. 1.1 is now ready for public consumption. Both, the accuracy of the cover images, as well as the quality of the images has been improved.

A single most often asked improvement was support for OGG files. This may be mostly due to me specifically asking no-one to say anything related to playlists, partylists or queues of any sort. Where was I? Oh yes, OGG support. A rather good first step support has been added now. UKMP loads ogg files and can play them as well. Album data for OGG files is based on the folder file is located in. This is not a long term solution, I will add proper tag reading for ogg files soon enough.

If ... no, WHEN you install UKMP 1.1, installer will ask you if you want to clean your cover images. I strongly recommend you to do it if you haven't perfected the covers yourself. As many of you already tried the 1.0 version (650+ downloads in a week from garage), you probably noticed that the first time you open UKMP it takes a while to download the cover images. The process was boring and only displayed the progress in a manner of showing the downloaded album name. 1.1 improves this by also displaying the cover image below the album name. So, slighly less boring first time. Ok, maybe it's a 'second time' for some of you if you opt to clear the archived cover images (which I still recommend).

And lastly, the code has been cleaned up slightly, resulting in a tiny bit faster functionality than 1.0.

While I've been writing this blog, five people have downloaded 1.0 version. I hope they don't mind downloading the 1.1 while they are at it.

1.1 is available from
Garage download page.
It needs python, so if you don't have it, you can install it from here:
Python maemo


If you want to have OGG support, install OGG libraries, which have been ported by Tuomas Kulve.

An installer for them is here:
http://ogg.garage.maemo.org/ogg-support.install