[shr-unstable] packages for canola media player

[Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 9:02 AM, Hermann
Lacheiner<hermann.lacheiner at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I have created packages for the canola media player (see
> http://openbossa.indt.org/canola/ for screenshots). canola was
> originally developed for the maemo platform and was open sourced
> recently. It is based on the e17 libraries, so it is destined for the
> shr distribution ;)
>
> Sources for the packages are from http://local.profusion.mobi:8081/
> based on the branches from Gustavo.
>
> canola has some dependencies so I created a testing feed. You can find
> the packages at http://schagaga.de/canolafeed/
> The bitbake recipes are mirrored at http://schagaga.de/myoverlay/
>
> "opkg install canola" installs canola and all its dependencies on the FR.

Excellent, thanks for your work! :-)

HUGE FAT NOTE: while Canola2 is a media application, it's built on the
excellent Python-Terra, this is what makes Canola possible, you can
even augment Canola with plugins like Remember The Milk (RTM, Todo),
Picasa or Pidgin as our GSoC students are doing, or create whole new
applications as Carman (http://openbossa.indt.org/carman/). You can
use it to create launchers, dialers and all. And it is fast and easy
to use! (Canola take a while because it imports tons of plugins and
checks DB and wakes some worker daemons...)


> Currently there are a few glitches:
> * canola package depends on glibc-gconv-iso8859-15 otherwise
> lightmediascanner does not work

You can just disable ISO8859-1 conversion for unknown original media
format (ie: ID3v1 or other formats that do not specify an encoding in
the tag or standard). You can change it using cnl-prefs-set or
terra-prefs-set -c /etc/canola.conf, or patch
canolad/src/canolad/prefs.py to not include that. For per-user
changes:

    cnl-set-prefs canolad charsets '[]'

will replace the old list that contains ISO-8859-1 with nothing and no
fallback will be used.


> * player UI does not fit exactly the lower resolution on the FR
> (canola is optimised for the resolution on the Nokia N8x0 800x480) but
> it's usable. User experience is better when rotating screen in
> landscape mode.

EcoreEvas can rotate the screen itself, so if you wish I can add an
option to start canola rotated. Maybe it's slower than Xrandr
rotation, maybe it's not, worth to try:

    ee.rotation = 90

right before ee.show()


> As backend mplayer is used for playback.
>
> Generally the UI is a little bit sluggish on the FR than on the Nokia
> N8x0 but I think it's really usable.

If we do a simple theme optimization it can be bit faster. I'm doing
this for a ProFUSION demo we're about to release videos, but we cannot
release the images or the theme itself. If there are manpower
interested in creating so, let me know... I can even help with code
(.edc), just don't have the time/skills to produce neat graphics.
Also, it would be amazing to have a canola themed to match SHR.

Again, this is of my interest and I can allocate my time or an
employee to help with such task to optimize, but we need a designer to
produce the images.

-- 
Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri
http://profusion.mobi embedded systems
--------------------------------------
MSN: barbieri at gmail.com
Skype: gsbarbieri
Mobile: +55 (19) 9225-2202