Thread: L.I.V.E. Player

I had a spare hour or so to test the functionality of the software last night. I do have to say I am pretty impressed with it. There are a few buggy issues , but that is to be expected with any probram in beta. If I had to make a suggestion at this time I would suggest the following : I was unable to edit the playlist , idealy there should be a way to remove a song once qued. I would also like to see a way to edit the music database.

Also how should our music directories be sorted to get the best results ? ie .. /MUSIC/KORN/(with each album having its on subdirectory)

Thanks for releasing this great program

Scorp

well i finally got it to play mp3's.
First off, the interface looks nice, i like it.
But there are a tad bit too many clicks to do what you want. To load it up and start playing music should be as quick as possible. Im not sure if i like the whole alphabet thing on the left side, i would just like a simple list of Artist that when clicked on shows the album/s for that artist. The alphabet is a cool idea to help sort, but it takes up way too much space and should be one of a few options of how to browse for music ie; something i can turn off if i want.

I really like what your doing so far though, keep it up.
How is the skin support? If you havent started on that yet i have a few ideas of how it would make skinners job a whole lot easier. more later.

[QUOTE=liquid_smoke] well i finally got it to play mp3's.
First off, the interface looks nice, i like it.
But there are a tad bit too many clicks to do what you want. To load it up and start playing music should be as quick as possible. Im not sure if i like the whole alphabet thing on the left side, i would just like a simple list of Artist that when clicked on shows the album/s for that artist. The alphabet is a cool idea to help sort, but it takes up way too much space and should be one of a few options of how to browse for music ie; something i can turn off if i want. [QUOTE]

I would have to agree with Liquid_Smoke; if you could have it automatically just go to browse by artist it would make the process much faster. It does seem to be 1 or 2 clicks a little much. Having an option to " always browse by artist " and possibly another option for people with a mass quantity of albums to have the " alphabetical selection " would be a good idea “ just wanted to throw my 2c in even though I am just saying the same thing as Liquid.

Scorp

dont have a lot of time right now to type, but the one feature for skinning that i would love for someone to adopt is this.

Image placement:
I want to be able to place any image anywhere i want to, and easily ie, i dont want to type in numbers to place items, drag and drop is the keyword here. But also some kind of precision placement will be needed to fix my jittery hands.

Any image or button i create should be able to be assigned to ANY function in the program or as many as realisticly possible.
So if i want to create a skin that when the app loads all you see is one big play button, i should be able to do this. So if you dont need certain parts of the app (GPS, radio etc) you dont need to make buttons for these and the feature wont be available at all.

External Application handleing:

This should work just like any other skinable feature in the app.
In the options/settings for the app i want to pic all the external apps that i want available to me. Then when i create a skin, i want to make a button that i can place anywhere (just like above) and assign the external app to this button. Really no need to have a menu of apps to choose from unless my list is big, in which case i could simply make a screen that had all the icons for apps i want to go to.

also buttons should be able to have more than one function assigned to it. Sort of like a macro assigned to a keyboard shortcut. I can make one button that goes to a certain screen and automaticly start doing something else when it gets there.

I have a few other ideas also, but the basis for all of this in the end is SPEED.
I must be able to get to where im going quickly and with as few clicks as possible.
Remember, im also driveing.

Right now im using plane ole winamp in my car because its the only app that lets me do what i want to do quickly and not get in the way. I found a skin that works great for my small 7in screen and find that its much quicker for me to just use winamp because everything else takes longer to do the same things. I load up mediaengine when i want to show off my system to someone etc. But dont really use it for daily driveing because of a few bugs small bugs that make things harder for me.

now back to work.
more later if anyone wants to continue talking about this type of stuff.

I'm really enjoying this app... The level of polish for an early beta is really exceptional. That said, a few issues:

1. I know it's been mentioned, but being able to remove songs from the queue would be great.
2. The ability to fast-forward/rewind and/or a progress slider for the track would be very helpful.
3. I'm sure this one is probably in there and I'm just missing it... DVD support. If it's in there, I'm not seeing it.
4. The database searching doesn't seem to be working for me. I can enter what I'd like to search for, but I don't see how to execute the search...

I'll write more later. Thanks for all the hard work!

-Randomtask

Originally Posted by TimmyM

I'm assuming this is where we should post bugs and such? if not point me in the right direction.

Yes, please put all bugs and issues here.

Originally Posted by TimmyM

I've installed it on two computers. Computer one, car-computer, when I go to start it says "The required display mode is not available on this system." I've tried changing the res in the Berlinx.ini but it doesn't seem to make a difference on either comuputer I've installed it on. I'm assuming it isn't possible to change res at this time?.

Yeah, I need to make this dynamic. Right now it does not read that value from the INI file. I will try to fix this in the next day or two.

Originally Posted by TimmyM

The second computer it runs fine....Except when I try to "add to playlist" it crashes. I think it may be me. What I should be doing is pressing Queue instead.

Hmmm... I have noticed a bug when the playlist dir is empty. Try putting a something.m3u in that dir. Then you should just double click the album, and it takes you to the track list screen, then select the tracks you want on a playlist, then click add.

Originally Posted by TimmyM

Video dir. I'm not sure if I have it setup right. I have videos in g:\video. There are sub directories in g:\video for movies that are in two files. I.E. g:\video\monsters inc. Any movies in G:\video do not show up in Movie Library. When I try to play a movie that is in two parts I.E. Monsters inc cd 1 and Monsters inc cd 2 it starts playing Monsters inc cd 2, not cd 1. It doesn't look like it's possible to browse the sub directory, monsters Inc, and queue up CD 1 then CD 2.

For right now, I am assuming that you will have all of your movies in a seperate subdir, and in this dir you will have a movieinfo.ini which tells me alittle bit about your movie file, what order to play it in, where the cover is, etc...

Originally Posted by TimmyM

Applications. It starts Notepad but if I select Close in L.I.V.E it does nothing. Notepad continues to run.

Yeah, the APPS section is just beginning, I have not implemented much here, just proof of concept right now...

Originally Posted by NightHunter

yeah, it's pretry buggy yet. I can't load movies at all, all I can do pretty much is play music. The visualization screen causes an error. looks great tough, I like the visualization idea. COOl

Movies are a little sketchy, but they do work great for me. The biggest thing is placing them in your MovieDir how it wants to find them. Visualization takes different amounts of time on different(slower/faster) machines to pop up. So I need an option delay timer, but it is hard coded for now.

Originally Posted by liquid_smoke

well i finally got it to play mp3's.
First off, the interface looks nice, i like it.
But there are a tad bit too many clicks to do what you want. To load it up and start playing music should be as quick as possible. Im not sure if i like the whole alphabet thing on the left side, i would just like a simple list of Artist that when clicked on shows the album/s for that artist. The alphabet is a cool idea to help sort, but it takes up way too much space and should be one of a few options of how to browse for music ie; something i can turn off if i want.

I really like what your doing so far though, keep it up.
How is the skin support? If you havent started on that yet i have a few ideas of how it would make skinners job a whole lot easier. more later.

I think we have many of the same ideas on skinning. I don't see the difference in having just the artist, or the alphabet, then the artists. Seems like the same amount of space. Without the screen in between Music Library, and the Artist/Album Selection I do not see a better place to put functions such as search, and playlist features. There are quite a few clicks sometimes, but I have been using this as my primary interface for well over 6 months now, and it is not too bad for changing songs, movies, etc...

Originally Posted by Randomtask

I'm really enjoying this app... The level of polish for an early beta is really exceptional. That said, a few issues:

1. I know it's been mentioned, but being able to remove songs from the queue would be great.
2. The ability to fast-forward/rewind and/or a progress slider for the track would be very helpful.
3. I'm sure this one is probably in there and I'm just missing it... DVD support. If it's in there, I'm not seeing it.
4. The database searching doesn't seem to be working for me. I can enter what I'd like to search for, but I don't see how to execute the search...

I'll write more later. Thanks for all the hard work!

-Randomtask

Thanks for the compliments.
Yes, queue editing needs to be implemented.

FF/Rew is there right now, just there is no button for it. Try pressing 'L' and 'K' on the keyboard. I have these mapped to my Media Remote for these functions.

It will play dvd's right now if you put the VOB file in the movie dir, I need to have a true DVD function to pkay from disc though. Problem is that I do not even have a DVD drive in my devel computer, or my CarPuter.

Finally, Searching needs about 2-3 hours work to finish up. We do not like the current skin on that screen right now anyway, so we kind of left it alone for now. All of the coding functions however are there.

Thanks Again,
Quincy