Media Player Functionality?

[impreziv]

i did some searching on here about this but didnt come up with much. it seems a few ppl asked about file support, but the only answer was 'lots'. so i posted up this thread to express my interest in seeing some good media player functionality.

i was MP3 player shopping for the last 2 months. i decided upon, and purchased an Ipod touch 32gb 2 weeks ago. i am a little less than enthused about a few things about it, but its is an all around good mp3 player, web browser, and not much else (yes it plays movies, but not compatible enough to make worth a mention). when i saw the pandora last week, i immediately decided it was my Ipod touch replacement.

i'll make a small wishlist, hopefully one of the Devs has a look. if not, let me know if you guys are also thinking the same, or am i alone

- file support: the usual mp3, wav, ogg are a must. but there are some other file formats out there such as FLAC. i have 15 or so albums ripped as FLAC.
- Gapless playback. the ability to play through a playlist, with absolutely no gap between songs. this is possible on Winamp by increasing the buffer, so it preloads the next song before finishing the current. (i listen to alot of Pink Floyd, so this is quite important to me, and it is the reason for ditching my last MP3 player).
- playlist support, and the ability to make playlists on the player.
- Winamp Plugins. this isnt super important or anything, but i think a good idea would be to look into adding support for Winamp Plugins. such as file support. there are alot of good winamp plugins for file support, taking advantage of their user-made plugins would cut alot of time out of developers doing this themselves.
- ability to access streaming audio feeds, such as Shoutcast. it would be sweet to be able to access shoutcast stations from work (i have a boring desk job).

i would think most of this was already considered, but in my hunt for an MP3 player replacement, none of the MP3 players on the market promised Gapless playback. and the only one supporting FLAC is a no-name company from China.

what do you guys think?

 

[gruso]

Gapless playback is important, yes.

 

[impreziv]

Gapless playback is important, yes.

yeh thats the only BIG one im hoping for. it sounds like such an easy feature to implement, but so very few MP3 players support it.

apple says the iPod supports it, but there is a noticable gap, if only 1ms, its there. Winamp does it flawlessly, if given a 2mb buffer.

 

[sindbad]

FLAC is a certainty on such a powerfull beast, especially if someone takes the time to write the decoding for the DSP.

Gapless playback is possible; if the player chosen can't do it out of the box, it shouldn't be too hard to add.
Any player for it will most definitely have playlists. Winamp skins are possible (XMMS), but I doubt they're any good on such a small screen.

Amarok is without a doubt the ultimate music player, but it may be too large. Exaile might fit the bill. XMMS in the worst case scenario (it would just look bad, no loss in function).

You can even hope for H.264 movies on it (since it's open pretty much any format for anything).

 

[impreziv]

Winamp skins are possible (XMMS), but I doubt they're any good on such a small screen.

skins arent really a concern of mine, although some might want it.

its the Winamp plugins that would be neat. theres dozens of audio-file support plugins out there. everything from Xbox/Dreamcast audio file support, to Flac, and raw DVD audio

 

[sindbad]

theres dozens of audio-file support plugins out there. everything from Xbox/Dreamcast audio file support, to Flac, and raw DVD audio

There should be out of the box support for any codec that exists for linux ARM. If not, they could be easily added. That means pretty much everything, no need for winamp plugins.

 

[Kings]

- Gapless playback. the ability to play through a playlist, with absolutely no gap between songs. this is possible on Winamp by increasing the buffer, so it preloads the next song before finishing the current. (i listen to alot of Pink Floyd, so this is quite important to me, and it is the reason for ditching my last MP3 player).
- playlist support, and the ability to make playlists on the player.
- Winamp Plugins. this isnt super important or anything, but i think a good idea would be to look into adding support for Winamp Plugins. such as file support. there are alot of good winamp plugins for file support, taking advantage of their user-made plugins would cut alot of time out of developers doing this themselves.
- ability to access streaming audio feeds, such as Shoutcast. it would be sweet to be able to access shoutcast stations from work (i have a boring desk job).

There was some talk of porting VLC, and my guess would be that XMMS would not be hard to port either. Both support streaming audio and playlists. I don't know if they do gapless playback, but its probably an easy fix. Don't count on Winamp plugins, look through XMMS if you want something similar.

 

[impreziv]

There was some talk of porting VLC, and my guess would be that XMMS would not be hard to port either. Both support streaming audio and playlists. I don't know if they do gapless playback, but its probably an easy fix. Don't count on Winamp plugins, look through XMMS if you want something similar.

VLC is a great idea, i didnt think of that

 

[Coder_TimT]

If you use mpd(which should be available as a Debian ARM package or just take a trivial recompile, since that's pretty much all it took on the gp2x) you'll get flac, gapless, playlists, and shoutcast for free. Then you can choose from a myriad of lightweight to heavyweight clients to use as a frontend, which may or may not work well on the pandora's screen. And if I end up getting a Pandora, I will be bringing over ommpc as a more pandora-centric frontend...or someone else might code something else up even better...

But as an mpd fan, I say mpd FTW...

 

[jhoff80]

I hate to say it here (I know everyone prefers open source) but wma support is a necessity for me, so that I can use windows media player to transcode my lossless files on the fly during syncing to something much more portable/ suitable for less storage space. And whoever makes multimedia frontends should definitely take a look at Canola for Maemo, because it does quite a few things right with its interface.

 

[impreziv]

I hate to say it here (I know everyone prefers open source) but wma support is a necessity for me, so that I can use windows media player to transcode my lossless files on the fly during syncing to something much more portable/ suitable for less storage space. And whoever makes multimedia frontends should definitely take a look at Canola for Maemo, because it does quite a few things right with its interface.

agreed. as much as WMA is my least favorite cock-in-the-ass.. support still needs to be there. alot of pay-per-download mp3 services use WMA only. but i dont really know how possible it is to make it DRM compatible.


another thing that would be nice to see is support for VOB playback. for this, Gapless playback would be an absolute MUST, as DVDs are almost always divided into muliple 2gb(?) files. a VLC port would take care of this, as it does have VOB support.

 

[JakeK]

Oooo I'd love the Pandora even more if it have VOB support in the media player. Movies contain multiple VOB files so yeah gapless playback is essential

 

[Snu]

If you use mpd(which should be available as a Debian ARM package or just take a trivial recompile, since that's pretty much all it took on the gp2x) you'll get flac, gapless, playlists, and shoutcast for free. Then you can choose from a myriad of lightweight to heavyweight clients to use as a frontend, which may or may not work well on the pandora's screen. And if I end up getting a Pandora, I will be bringing over ommpc as a more pandora-centric frontend...or someone else might code something else up even better...

i was thinking of writing an mpd frontend specifically for portable audio playback... something like the excellent mortplayer for windows mobile (but with a media library as well). in particular i love the dedicated buttons to switch between playlists/directories and full screen modes with big text. i need something that can be easily controlled without needing to look at it and without any trouble for when im driving.
not sure how hard it would be to write tho.
mpd is nice, but it doesnt have much in the way of file format support, and i never did find a frontend even close to as nice as amarok or better yet, winamp.
QUOTE
its the Winamp plugins that would be neat. theres dozens of audio-file support plugins out there. everything from Xbox/Dreamcast audio file support, to Flac, and raw DVD audio

i agree, winamp plugins would be awesome, but just not a possibility since they are x86 compiled dll's. even if a program was written that supported them (which would also require wine), they wouldnt work without recompilation for arm, or an emulator.
hopfully something will show up that can play spc/gym/nsf/psf/usf/gbs/gsf/lpac/mod/s3m/xm/it/etc...
QUOTE
Oooo I'd love the Pandora even more if it have VOB support in the media player. Movies contain multiple VOB files so yeah gapless playback is essential

vob files are just a container with mpeg2 video and ac3 audio, shouldnt be too hard to play back. also, an easy way to get a single vob file off a dvd is to use dvdshrink to make a backup of it (doesnt need to reencode or anything). then, if you have a prog that doesnt support vob, simply use mediacoder to change the container without reencoding.

 

[impreziv]

i agree, winamp plugins would be awesome, but just not a possibility since they are x86 compiled dll's.

good call. i wasnt really sure how they worked. only that the hard work is done for us, if we can borrow someone else's plugin library.

 

[tofupancho]

I hope I'm not the only one hoping for ALAC support. I understand it's an apple format, but I have tons of albums in ALAC format because until I get my hands on Pandora, my iPod is my primarily portable music player.

The single biggest thing I'm crossing my fingers for is that the player has an intuitive touch-screen UI that lets me pull up playlists, albums, and songs quickly and easily while driving so I don't have to take my eyes off the road for long. Beyond that, I would gladly pay up to $40 for a gorgeous media app a la XMBC with tons of file support and lots of features

 

[jhoff80]

I hope I'm not the only one hoping for ALAC support. I understand it's an apple format, but I have tons of albums in ALAC format because until I get my hands on Pandora, my iPod is my primarily portable music player.

The single biggest thing I'm crossing my fingers for is that the player has an intuitive touch-screen UI that lets me pull up playlists, albums, and songs quickly and easily while driving so I don't have to take my eyes off the road for long.

Like I mentioned in my previous post, borrowing from the interface to Canola would definitely be smart for any developer of a media app. While there are things I don't like about it that are hopefully going to be fixed, its a great interface in many ways for this sort of thing. While we're on the subject of lossless files, WMA lossless would be nice too, though I don't know how possible it is.

 

[Chip]

I hope I'm not the only one hoping for ALAC support.

ALAC playback is built into both VLC and Mplayer, at least one of which will be ported to Pandora (Mplayer is already running on a dev board).

In other words, yes

 

[AireTamStorm]

- Winamp Plugins. this isnt super important or anything, but i think a good idea would be to look into adding support for Winamp Plugins. such as file support. there are alot of good winamp plugins for file support, taking advantage of their user-made plugins would

Most all Linux media players have support for pretty much every media format out there. Plugins would be unnecessary overhead when compared to compiled and optimized codec libraries. Don't worry, every oddball file format out there will play.

As others have said, FLAC is pretty much guaranteed on the Pandora. I never really thought about it, but I HAYT on my PSP for not being able to play these. Overkill for a non-digital output? Maybe. But even 320kbps MP3 sounds watered down in the higher and lower frequencies to me. FLAC doesn't. Guess I really need those 16GB SD cards now...

Feature request: RAID support in the kernel for those cards
No? LVM then maybe?

 

[impreziv]

Feature request: RAID support in the kernel for those cards

RAID is an interesting idea. i cant say it would be useful to me, unless i had a file that needed to span across 2 cards. or i suppose, even a directory that spanned over 2 cards.

yes those Flac files take up alot of room. Flac is quite overkill on a portable device with a headphone jack. support is nice, but i wont use it much. i mostly use my Flac ripped albums for playing on my home stereo.

 

[sindbad]

or i suppose, even a directory that spanned over 2 cards.

For that, symbolic links are better.