On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 09:28:11PM EDT, Elizabeth Dodd wrote: [..]
> no, if you have a system in which your mp3 files / flv files are not > in a SINGLE directory TREE you could just point it at '/' and navigate > anywhere but if you have /home/user/Music you point freevo at > '/home/user/Music' Thanks, this makes sense. Having to customize via a configuration file is the price you have to pay for the simplicity of the interface. What fooled me is that the debian packaging should really provide a post-install script that lets you set at least the basic options, and optionally tell you where to go for additional customization. I had not trouble editing the local_conf.py file - or rather the copy I made to my home directory - and pretty much everything that I needed now works (this is a laptop and I don't have a TV/radio card, for instance). But I am an intermediate user of linux with a good command of his editor and some knowledge of python syntax. I hate to think how long it would take the average Windows defector to get this to work..! Things that are not working smoothly at this point: 1. Switching to full-screen mode results in a blank (black, actually) screen: I have set freevo to start full-screen but after I hit 'z', the currently playing video clip is scaled back to the default size that I specified in local_conf.py and positioned at +x+y = +0+0 (top left corner of display) and the rest of the screen is black. If I hit 'z' a second time, I get a black screen - I have to hit 'z' again and then the escape key to get out of this and back to the freevo menu. 2. RSS is not working - neither with the default freevo feeds nor links that I copied from google.news for instance. I get a "No Headlines found" message. I don't have a standalone aggregator handy on this system to help me make good guesses. I need to take a closer look. Things that I would like to tweak/improve: 1. Keyboard actions do not suit my habits - mainly I would need to bind the hjkl keys to navigate the screens more efficiently and something like q to the "shutdown" option. I saw a stanza near the end of the local_conf.py file named "events" that has a few examples of how you define custom bindings but I would need a list of the events' canonical names in order to do that. I'll read the doc tomorrow - otherwise they should be defined somewhere in /usr/bin/freevo.real, I guess. 2. Many of the .flv's that I have are music and I would prefer having them recognized as such by freevo in order to have the benefit of features like playlists (such as playing an entire directory) and possibly random play, repeat, etc. I have seen some promising hints in local_conf.py that this might be possible. 3. I haven't had time to look into web TV & radio as yet but this should be straightforward. I just need to retrieve the links from my bash history and figure out how to pass options such as cache size etc. to mplayer. 4. When using mplayer from the bash prompt, watching web TV or .flv clips, I specify a "geometry" so that the output is positioned in a small window somewhere near the top right corner of the screen, out of my way, so I can get on with whatever I am doing. Then, I would use 'f' to toggle full screen mode. Not sure if I can achieve something similar with freevo. The irony of it is that I was looking for a curses-based front-end to mplayer because as I may have mentioned elsewhere I didn't need the aggravation of a GUI.. and I end up with this really delightful freevo interface.. let's call it a "post GUI" concept. :-) Outside the CLI or text-mode screen-oriented applications, it's the first time I run into an application that does what the user needs rather than what the developer thought would be good for the user. Thanks much for help and any pointers and comments about the above much appreciated. Naturally, many thanks to the author(s) of freevo..! CJ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge _______________________________________________ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users