Video Player

[zohnnyg]

what kind of video will pandora play? can a windows media viewer file play on pandora?http://gameads.gamepressure.com/ has commercials for video games that you can watch or download for free. i think they are all in wmv format. it would be cool to have for instance some old atari 2600 game commercials to watch before or after you play some emulated atari 2600 games! or nintendo or sega or anything else! fun stuff!

 

[Consequence_9]

yes.

the 'v' in wmv stands for video btw.

 

[laurencevde]

AFAIK, it won't be able to play much out-of-the-box due to patent-issues. Probably only wav, ogg, flac and possibly theora.
However, after installing a couple of additional packages, it will be able to play just about anything. Everything that can be played by mplayer, xine, vlc and/or gstreamer, depending on what video-app/frontend you use. They should all be available.
Yes, this includes (non-drm-)wmv.
Only limit is CPU-usage. AFAIK, h264-hd cannot be done on just the ARM-CPU. The chip does have a DSP that should be powerful enough, but it's lacking documentation...

 

[WizardStan]

As far as I know, the plan is to not include a video player at all out of the box. The trick with patented file formats is that you can download players for them, but OpenPandora can't officially endorse them, or something like that. So the choices were either to give partial playback of open formats, like OGG and FLAC, and be stuck not being able to tell people where to get more, or say they need to go to the file archive to get an OGG player, and hey, convenient, the stuff needed to play MP3s and WMV files is right beside it. But they didn't tell you where to find it, so it's ok.
I *think* that's what was decided anyway.

 

[spinghed]

As far as I know, the plan is to not include a video player at all out of the box. The trick with patented file formats is that you can download players for them, but OpenPandora can't officially endorse them, or something like that. So the choices were either to give partial playback of open formats, like OGG and FLAC, and be stuck not being able to tell people where to get more, or say they need to go to the file archive to get an OGG player, and hey, convenient, the stuff needed to play MP3s and WMV files is right beside it. But they didn't tell you where to find it, so it's ok.
I *think* that's what was decided anyway.

Does this mean having to compile our own apps from source? I mean, is there a binary of vlc or mplayer for ARM that I can just download and run?

Or are we all expected to be Linux fluent (which I'm not at all). I imagine that after a while stuff will start appearing ready to go because those in the know have already done it.



~R~

 

[mali]

http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/repo/?pkgname=mplayer
http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/repo/?pkgname=vlc

 

[Consequence_9]

is there a binary of vlc or mplayer for ARM that I can just download and run?

yah, that's the idea. To this end the 'pnd' package format was created, not to mention ARM ports of vlc & mplayer are already available in the angstrom repository.

edit: ninja'd h34r:

 

[sterling976]

Does this mean having to compile our own apps from source? I mean, is there a binary of vlc or mplayer for ARM that I can just download and run?
~R~

You won't need to compile anything. In fact, you should be able to configure the Angstrom repositories in your opkg/ipkg/dpkg configuration (whichever Pandora supports out-of-the-box) and then type `opkg update; opkg install mplayer` You may have to install some of its dependencies, but that's just a matter of running that command a few more times with <packagename> substituted for 'mplayer.'

Or, most likely, someone will put together a .pnd file for it and you'll just copy it over to your SD card.

Heh. Double-ninja'd. Posting anyway.

 

[lulzfish]

Yes, and we'll expect you to write the compiler by hand in ARM machine code.
The compiler's source is in Prolog.

Have a good time.

No, obviously I'm joking. You'll probably just have to go somewhere, download a file, tell the Pandora to install it, and then everything will work perfectly. No compiling or anything.

The only issue will be putting that "somewhere" far enough from OpenPandora to cover their asses while close enough to let the users know where it is.

 

[WizardStan]

Or, most likely, someone will put together a .pnd file for it and you'll just copy it over to your SD card.

This is the one I'm expecting: package a PND in the repository with just open formats which OpenPandora can officially point you to, but conveniently right beside it is one labeled "don't download that one, get this one: it has added support for MP3 and WMV and MPEG and..."
Getting around stupid rules is not fun.

 

[spinghed]

well I consider myself well and truly answered and ninja'd!

~Rick~

 

[borgqueenx]

will VLC media player work on the panda? i have alot webcam stream files i cant convert(ml20) and alot of game movies in a weird own format that also vlc can read.

 

[Near_Kstor]

I'd love to have the XBMC on the Pandora, it's an amazing frontend for all kinds of media, I am just not sure if the pandora is powerful enough to run it...

Being open source, we could even add to it an option to directly play the pandora games/apps (through .pnd), allowing the XBMC to be the ultimate eletronic entertainment frontend for our pandoras =P

XBMC Page if anyone still not familiar with this great application

 

[lulzfish]

will VLC media player work on the panda? i have alot webcam stream files i cant convert(ml20) and alot of game movies in a weird own format that also vlc can read.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure VLC will work. It's probably already in the repos if anyone can actually remember where the hell they are.

 

[borgqueenx]

will VLC media player work on the panda? i have alot webcam stream files i cant convert(ml20) and alot of game movies in a weird own format that also vlc can read.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure VLC will work. It's probably already in the repos if anyone can actually remember where the hell they are.

and will it have functionality like the latest VLC im using on windows? i mean, will it support all codecs on pandora?

 

[mali]

Sorry to say, but it's best to read prior posts before asking questions
As for XBMC, check the Beagleboard project.

 

[lulzfish]

will VLC media player work on the panda? i have alot webcam stream files i cant convert(ml20) and alot of game movies in a weird own format that also vlc can read.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure VLC will work. It's probably already in the repos if anyone can actually remember where the hell they are.

and will it have functionality like the latest VLC im using on windows? i mean, will it support all codecs on pandora?

Of course. VLC uses all its own codecs, it should be identical between platforms except for the video / audio backends and the GUI toolkit. (It uses Qt, which IIRC draws its own widgets in X11 and delegates to Win32 in Windows)

 

[borgqueenx]

thanks for answering

 

[Wolfsclaw]

I'd love to have the XBMC on the Pandora, it's an amazing frontend for all kinds of media, I am just not sure if the pandora is powerful enough to run it...

Being open source, we could even add to it an option to directly play the pandora games/apps (through .pnd), allowing the XBMC to be the ultimate eletronic entertainment frontend for our pandoras =P

XBMC Page if anyone still not familiar with this great application

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