Free Software & Hacking & Maemo & Python Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri on 19 Apr 2007 12:31 pm
New maemo player: “catota”
Some time ago, just after Morpheuz posted “Prison Break: Freedom for your videos”, people were asking for UI being able to play it, so I joined the bandwagon and started to write a MPlayer frontend in Python, “Catota” was born.
Catota, which means “snot” in Brazil (see README), is a quick hack and will not evolve as yet-another-player, however it’s usable and extensible, so I can continue my experiments. As the screenshots show, it has a plugin system to enable various sources, featuring now “GMyth Streamer” (broken, see below), “Local Files” and “Pass Through” (to pass anything to MPlayer, like smb://a/b/c).
These experiments were really useful for both Catota and GMyth Streamer. I’ve discovered that MPlayer for Maemo now uses dspmp3sink by default, and that sucks a lot! Hell, just being back to ffmpeg codecs and esd output solved a lot of problems, that’s why Catota ships with this by default. Also, MPlayer crashes more than expected when using Xv output and toggle fullscreen.
On GMyth Streamer front, what Artur (Morpheuz) did great was to discover MEncoder settings, but his server was a bit bad (we share the same house here in Recife, so I know he did the entire code on a Sunday night!), so I got some knowledge with Python and its libraries (SocketServer and friends) and give him a hand, providing a Catota-Server as example. This Catota-Server is now the base of GMyth Streamer! Great! (However now I need to update GMyth Streamer source to use the new schema).
On the Catota features, I did a really nice thing that should be adopted by every Maemo application: auto-save every input field. Catota always remember last volume, mute, selected file, entered URL… It just sucks having to set those every time you start the application.
Source is available at: http://barbieri-playground.googlecode.com/svn/maemo/catota/ (SVN)
4 Responses to “New maemo player: “catota””
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
on 19 Apr 2007 at 12:57 pm 1.maxilogan said …
Ok, I’m really a noob regarding programming and at understanding what programmers say
but that’s my question: I see two words “gmyth streamer” and “broken” on the same line 
Does this mean that we still are not able to stream from a MythTV server?
I’m currently setting up it on my Ubuntu linuxbox, and I’d be very happy to see its recorded files on my 770 (not an N800!).
Will I someone or another succeed in this or not?
Thanks!
Omar
on 19 Apr 2007 at 12:58 pm 2.maxilogan said …
ooops! “Will I someday or another succeed in this or not?” is what I wanted to write…
on 19 Apr 2007 at 2:21 pm 3.MoRpHeUz said …
Well, right now I’m rewriting GMyth-Streamer’s core engine based on “Catota-Server”
that Gustavo talked about.
This will have more features and will be kind of “multi-task”. You can checkout it
from our svn
and try it. We were able to play our videos from MythTV on the device (not live TV yet..just doing it)..
As soon as it’s finished you’ll be able to play digital tv on n800 also. Thanks to Gustavo
that helped a lot with ideas and this new core =P
on 19 Apr 2007 at 3:33 pm 4.Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri said …
Omar,
My support is broken since it uses the old protocol, GMyth Streamer works fine, they’re now using catota-server as base and already have MEncoder plugin working fine, with Gstreamer version almost there.
But note that Artur (morpheuz) is working on get the general streaming working, it’s not tied or integrated with MythTv yet. At one hand this is great, because I can stream DVB, DVD or any other thing that MEncoder handles, but on the other hand it’s not able to play recorded videos from MythTv… but this will be possible, sooner than later