"Native" PAN support for maemo

The waiting is finally over. There is now support for phone-tethering via the PAN Bluetooth profile, which is so popular on Windows Mobile smartphones.

By "native" I mean that it's quite well built into the system and does not appear as a separate application. And you no longer need a command line or root access for making PAN connections.

After you have installed the maemo-pan add-on (sorry, only OS 2008 supported so far), you can get online with just a few simple steps:

• Go to the system preferences and add your phone in the phone settings. Do not enter the wizard for configuring the dialup settings. PAN does not use them.


• Start internet sharing on your phone. It depends on your phone how and where to do this. On Windows Mobile 5, open the Start menu and select "internet connection sharing" from there.


• Make sure that Bluetooth is enabled on your internet tablet. Now open the connection dialog and you will see that there is a new connection called "Bluetooth-PAN". Select it and you will be connected to the internet via PAN.


• When you're finished, just close the connection the usual way. Wasn't this easy? :)

Thanks go to aleksandyr for figuring out stuff and to Frantisek Dufka for writing the initial PAN connection shell script for OS 2008. Without you guys maemo-pan wouldn't have happened!

No, MediaBox Media Center is NOT developed by Nokia

Somebody at maemo.org must have thought MediaBox was a Nokia application while tagging some pages. The MediaBox entry on maemo.org/downloads is tagged with "Application developed by NOKIA". This is plain wrong!

No, I am not working for Nokia, and MediaBox Media Center is not related to Nokia in any way.

MediaBox once again - 0.94.2 this time

Maybe I was too quick releasing MediaBox 0.94.1 yesterday. The config reader bug which could cause hanging during startup was only partially fixed in 0.94.1. So here's release 0.94.2 with even more bug fixes hitting the maemo download servers.

MediaBox 0.94.1 fixing a few things

I have just released Version 0.94.1 of the MediaBox Media Center. This is a bugfix release and will help you if you experienced MediaBox 0.94 hanging on startup.

The new version also adds support for non-UTF-8 character encodings in ID3 tags, such as ISO-8859-1 and UTF-16.

Thanks to all users who reported bugs and made suggestions!

MediaBox 0.94 - the New Enhancements and a Big Thank You!

Thank you all for reporting bugs and giving new suggestions for MediaBox Media Center! You help me a lot making this the best and friendliest media center for the tablets! Keep on reporting; you decide what's important!



So here is release 0.94 with a lot of small improvements.

The media scanner will now cache already loaded thumbnails so it will be quicker after you add or remove a media folder. You can also specify for each folder which kind of media you have in there. Thus you will be able to avoid getting all your album cover art listed in the image viewer, for example.



If you've always wanted to play the FM radio through the loudspeakers, you can do so now. MediaBox can finally switch from headphones to loudspeakers when the headphones are plugged in as FM radio antenna. The FM radio is only available on the N800, though.

The button on the Nokia headset is now also supported and you can press it to pause and resume playback.

I have also added a tag parser for FLAC tags and fixed some flaws regarding FLAC playback. FLAC is a free and lossless audio codec for high quality audio.

MediaBox is now powered by player backends for mplayer and the native osso-media-server. By selecting between two backends, more media formats can be played back. This especially adds support for real media and real internet radio streams (.ram), as well as MP4 and 3GP videos.

The new MediaBox release is available from the website as well as through the application manager in the Maemo extras catalogue. The package installs on OS 2006 (video playback not yet supported on the 770), OS 2007, and OS 2008.