Saturday, October 10, 2009

MediaBox on the N900

The popular NIT media center MediaBox is coming to the N900. Thanks to lots of user feedback the UI has been further simplified and optmized and of course "fremantlized". :)





The upcoming release for the N900 will be the first version to provide suport for portrait and landscape orientations. Browsing your music feels great in portrait mode!





MediaBox will support playing FM radio on the N900 as well (the N900 device specs don't list the FM radio, but there is one, on the Bluetooth chip).

Media indexing is now driven by tracker, the native indexer of the Fremantle OS. And if you don't like indexing you can of course browse the file system as before.

When you start MediaBox you will see the dashboard. This is where you can access your playlists, browse the device and your UPnP/DLNA servers, and access your indexed music, videos, and pictures. You can even put shortcuts to your stuff onto the dashboard for quick access, e.g. songs or albums you like, or folders with photos. No matter how deep within folders and subfolders you are, the dashboard is only one finger-tap away.

Another new feature is the folder history where you can see the folders where you recently were and go back.

If you have Tuomas Kulve's ogg-support installed, you will also be able to play Ogg Vorbis and FLAC music.

MediaBox still uses its own lightweight UPnP subsystem instead of gupnp that comes with Fremantle. My experience shows that the UPnP subsystem of MediaBox is still more compatible with the servers out there than gupnp is right now.

MediaBox is currently in the extras-devel repository for Fremantle and it's marked as an incomplete beta version. I expect to upload the full release later this month, after which it moves on to the extras-testing repository for community Q&A. Then it should only be a matter of time until it will appear in the extras repository.
The beta version in extras-devel is now updated frequently.

The new version will also be available for Diablo after the release for Fremantle. Portrait mode will be supported on Diablo, too, if you have rotation-support installed.

5 comments:

zeenix said...

My experience shows that the UPnP subsystem of MediaBox is still more compatible with the servers out there than gupnp is right now.

The correct way to solve that would be to file bugs on gupnp and we haven't received any from you.

I think the real problem for you would be the nonexistence of python binding for gupnp but one dude is working on that fortunately.

Martin Grimme said...

I assume the file manager and media player on the N900 use gupnp. And those had trouble with my UPnP server. I did not make extensive compatibility tests yet, so I don't have enough information for filing a useful bug report. If I have more information to help you I will file bugs. This will certainly be the case when I'm trying to move the UPnP stuff in MediaBox to gupnp. It's good to hear that somebody is already working on Python bindings.

physicow said...

wewt. I was sad the n810 didn't have an fm receiver.

Also, mediabox rocks. I just hope that I can get an n900.

Anyhow, I'm a big fan of MediaBox, on the n810 and hopefully someday on the n900. :)

zeenix said...

I assume the file manager and media player on the N900 use gupnp

FileManager doesn't and it still uses the crappy old clinkc from diablo times. MediaPlayer on the other hand does use gupnp but very indirectly and therefore some of the problems you encounter (especially if they are discovery related) are most probably not caused by gupnp layers.

About filing bugs, you can simply install gupnp-av-cp on your workstation and see if you can re-produce any issue with that. If you can, no need for a lot of details, just report the problems.

Unknown said...

For me on startup mediabox sayd it detected my MediaTomb UPnP media server but couldn't actually find it anywhere in the GUI. What I'm mostly looking forward is a media-player that can set aspect-ratios for the videos when I play movies with the TV-out. Do you think this feature will be in MediaBox in the future?