Thursday, March 27, 2008

Banshee Media Player

Banshee is now the Banshee Media Player. With the release of 1.0 Alpha 2 we've added support for video management and playback! It works, looks, and feels great. Banshee playing a video in its new Now Playing source Our goal with trunk has always been to fix fundamental design issues and create a well-organized, flexible, and powerful code base. And video support has proven to us that we've been successful. We were able to add video management with very little code and playlists, smart playlists, searching, queuing, and bookmarks all just work. We also have a wonderful new source called Now Playing. It sits at the top of your source list and is where video playback happens. And the idea, coming in Alpha 3, is when you're playing audio you'll find visualizations, Last.fm recommendations, and other contextual information there. Aaron goes into more detail about features, running the latest from svn, and more on his blog.

10 comments:

  1. Can it stream video in from a mythtv backend?

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  2. @anonymous I'm not sure. What protocol/formats does it use?

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  3. If GStreamer supports the protocol and codecs, it should work in Banshee.

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  4. There's a mythtv source for GStreamer but you have to provide some UI to make it easy to use. You could of course put mythtv://blabla URLs in banshee and that should work out of the box but totem's mythtv plugin for example shows what an UI should provide ;)

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  5. Will it play dvd's like totem does?

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  6. well dont be too proud. the easy addition of video support is actually the credit of gstreamer not yours. You would actually need a pretty bad design to break your programm by adding video using gstreamer.

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  7. @last anonymous: What I'm proud about is the video management side of things (importing, playlists, searching, etc) that required very little extra effort to get working. Of course, Aaron did a great job with the gstreamer pipeline and Gdk/Gtk work to display video, too. Gstreamer definitely deserves kudos.

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  8. This is the coolest open source related new piece so far this year. Although an other anonymous laments the TECHNICAL easyness ("don't take credit, gstreamer rules aok, blahblah") the real novelty is in DOING the proper thing and adding this feature.

    Always far more important than the technical side is knowing WHAT to build and what to use. You guys hit a bullseye!

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  9. I've been running the latest version of banshee from svn since 1.0 alpha 1, and I'm really impressed, it looks very cool. The video library in particular looks awesome.

    One question though, when are you going to add the "Ratings" column back?

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  10. Now it looks especially silly to have a top level menu item labelled "Music" instead of the tried and tested and consistent use of "File".

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