Media Player Dreams

[MukiEX]

When the "What do you plan to use the Adam for" was asked on the Wordpress site, #2 or #3 were "Multimedia". I want an Adam, but sadly, I think the video player is gonna suck bad on day 1, and nothing short of a major change to Stagefright or Opencore is going to fix this.

So by "suck", I mean that it won't be capable of...

• ...playing any format other than MP4 with AVC or MPEG-4 video
• ...using multiple audio tracks
• ...using embedded or external caption/subtitle files

Basically, I would love more container support (MKV, MOV, AVI), multiple audio track/subs support (for foreign films/shows), and software fallbacks for non-supported codecs. Unfortunately, there are no current Android players that can do this. All of the ones with software decoding support can only play via software (Think VPlayer, RockPlayer, or VLC on the iPhone), and the few that have other options come down to "regular MP4 for full software decode".

It's dissapointing, but I guess, at least for the first six months, it beats nothing. The Tegra 2 should be powerful enough to at least play SD videos in software. I hope Notion Ink has something planned, but in all honesty, given how few people would appreciate it (MKV video players are a substantially tiny portion of the consumer market), I can understand them postponing it for development later or just not bothering at all.

Still, it'd be nice to be surprised on this matter ^_^

[josh4trunks]

When the "What do you plan to use the Adam for" was asked on the Wordpress site, #2 or #3 were "Multimedia". I want an Adam, but sadly, I think the video player is gonna suck bad on day 1, and nothing short of a major change to Stagefright or Opencore is going to fix this.

So by "suck", I mean that it won't be capable of...

• ...playing any format other than MP4 with AVC or MPEG-4 video
• ...using multiple audio tracks
• ...using embedded or external caption/subtitle files

Basically, I would love more container support (MKV, MOV, AVI), multiple audio track/subs support (for foreign films/shows), and software fallbacks for non-supported codecs. Unfortunately, there are no current Android players that can do this. All of the ones with software decoding support can only play via software (Think VPlayer, RockPlayer, or VLC on the iPhone), and the few that have other options come down to "regular MP4 for full software decode". But that codec company even said hardware decoding was better on the battery then cpu+codec.

It's dissapointing, but I guess, at least for the first six months, it beats nothing. The Tegra 2 should be powerful enough to at least play SD videos in software. I hope Notion Ink has something planned, but in all honesty, given how few people would appreciate it (MKV video players are a substantially tiny portion of the consumer market), I can understand them postponing it for development later or just not bothering at all.

Still, it'd be nice to be surprised on this matter ^_^

With a dual core 1GHz processor and codecs we don't need to even use the gpu for 1080p. I saw some video about an optimized codec pack being developed(I think it's already ready, just not released) for android. It supports every format, even dts audio I belive! I'll see if I can find the video again.

[exodusapps]

I dont want to get your hopes up just yet, it wont be our first project, but its definitely on our list to bring Adam an amazing Media Center. I copied your post into our project file for the feature suggestion

[Trovatrice]

One of the greatest thrills when I tried my Android phone for the first time was to discover that it fully supports .ogg files including the ID3 tag fields.

I've spent thousands of hours compiling an Early Music Library database, entering custom ID3 tags for each track of each of my CDs, so I can sort/search by album, composer, performer, instrument, genre, period, piece name.

My favorite player was a clean but powerful one called Muzikbrowzer, but it stopped working at Windows 7. It has a great feature list and works really well. I would love to see it, or something similar for Android/Adam!

# Hierarchical browsing and searching by genre, artist, etc.
# Cover art (optional)
# Plays mp3, wma, ogg, flac
# Powerful tag editing
# Playlist manager
# Display elements fully customizable
# Replay Gain volume leveling
# Manage 10s of thousands of files without bogging down
# Skinnable

[MukiEX]

I dont want to get your hopes up just yet, it wont be our first project, but its definitely on our list to bring Adam an amazing Media Center. I copied your post into our project file for the feature suggestion

I shot up a quick mockup of what would make for a nice interface. I tried keeping in line with Adam's aesthetic rules (tho I kinda fudged it with adding a backlight to the time marker). Of note are the fact that caption/audio tracks are quickly accessible without getting in the way. Also, "caption" and "subtitle" are interchangeable here. The former term is correct, but the latter is more commonly used today.

So, tap the screen while the video is playing, and bam:

The interface.

Tap that caption button and you get this (it'd be even nicer if the button slides out while the tracks slide in):

Switching tracks.

Other notes:

• I moved the timeline away from the navigation buttons on purpose. Makes it easy to not accidentally move the timeline while trying to pause.
• The time marker serves two purposes. One, it makes for a nice touch target for fine-tuning the time (you only want to go a few seconds forward/backward). Two, it makes it immediately obvious that the top bar is the time line (especially important at the beginning of a movie, when it's essentially a single solid color).
• The transparency in the track picker only shows up if more than 3 caption/audio tracks are present. It makes it easy to see that there are more tracks without covering up the other buttons.
• The active track is the brightest. Language expressed with flag, track name in text.
• While not shown, a resume query when opening a previously-played movie would be nice.

Obviously, just a quick mockup, but it would be really nice if someone out there built their media player like this. I'm long since tired of reaching 3 menus deep, TWICE, to change the audio/caption tracks away from the defaults. Or, of course, not having the option in the first place.

[phazei]

compatible song ratings in media player

[crimton]

almost my entire movie collection is in avi or mkv. i will be dissappointed if i cannot play them

[josh]

I have to say, the recent post by Slashgear put my fears on compatibility to bed.

"Notion Ink has put together its own custom FFMPEG pack, and that results in zero buffering delay when shuttling video around; there’s no lag at all, it’s like watching it on a dedicated Blu-ray player. Notion Ink has put together its own custom FFMPEG pack, and that results in zero buffering delay when shuttling video around; there’s no lag at all, it’s like watching it on a dedicated Blu-ray player."

The second they mentioned FFMPEG, well... that just says it all right there, then, doesn't it?

[Knoc]

almost my entire movie collection is in avi or mkv. i will be dissappointed if i cannot play them

I hear ya. Hoping this vlc android drops soon.