MediaBox 0.93 with support for embedded ID3 album art and more

Maybe you have already noticed that there's now MediaBox 0.93 available in the maemo-extras repositories for OS 2007 and OS 2008.

So what's new in this release?

First of all, rendering became a bit faster. Many rendering operations are now directly performed on the X server where they run 2D-hardware-accelerated. Previously, only the kinetic scrolling was done like this. Especially the Nokia 770 gives very smooth results that way.

But much more important, the media scanner became a lot quicker. So if there are no new thumbnails to generate, it will scan your media in almost no time. Together with deferred thumbnail assembling, this greatly speeds up startup time.
The scanner is now also much more robust and knows how to get past bad media files that make mplayer hang during thumbnailing. Oh, and you can now watch the new thumbnails while they are being created.

I have improved the ID3 tag parser as well and it supports ID3 v1, v2.2, v2.3, v2.4 now. If you have album art embedded in your ID3 tags, then chances are good that MediaBox will be able to show it.

MediaBox also runs on the Nokia 770 with OS 2006, but video still does not work reliably there, and there are still some memory issues to be solved. But it's perfectly usable as a photo viewer or for playing music. Of course I'll keep testing MediaBox on the 770 and try to make it work even better.

See the release notes for more.