Bangarang – a media player

July 8, 2010

Bangarang 2.0 alpha available

Filed under: Uncategorized — jamboarder @ 9:25 pm

A source tarball for the alpha version Bangarang 2.0 is available here.

This alpha phase will be a relatively subdued affair.  It mostly intended as a nearly-feature-complete sneak peak for fans of the app. As our team is very small and our bandwidth is limited, we’re focusing our efforts on getting to feature-complete and into a more formal beta testing phase at which point we can focus on bug-fixing and polishing. A more detailed release announcement will accompany beta and final release.

Of course, this is pre-release software and, as with all such software, it may have an unpredictably voracious appetite for kittens and puppies and all things of universal cuteness and value.

Important: If you elect take a look at this alpha release, the first thing to do is to go the “Media Lists” view and select Advanced>Update Ontologies from the dropdown menu in the upper right. Bangarang 1.x stored media information in the nepomuk store using a draft version of the nepomuk shared desktop ontologies that was not ready at the time of the 1.0 release. The tool updates the way the information is stored to properly use the latest released version of the ontologies. This will take a while depending on the size of your collection. After this is run your media information should show just fine in the app.

Special thanks to Stefan Burnicki for the immense help provided so far.

20 Comments »

  1. I hope that you will add video subtitle support soon, this is feature killer for me, for others people probably also. Thanks for great work

    Comment by nomenomen — July 9, 2010 @ 12:25 am

  2. About subtitle support, is’t still coming to 2.0 or will it be postponed to 3.0 or something? And when it comes will it support styled subtitles and such? Kinda must have when it comes to watching anime. But yeah, this is by far the most interesting KDE mediaplayer project, so keep up the good work and thanks!

    Comment by Teho — July 9, 2010 @ 3:26 am

    • Subtitle support will depend on the capabilities of the phonon backend. I originally thought to add support for external subtitles independently, but became aware of external subtitle support being added to phonon. One of the principles of the project is to use the KDE pillars, the benefits of which are that it will provide visible use-cases for the hard work being put into the underlying technologies. So, we’ll add as much subtitle support as is provided by the phonon backend. Right now that means DVD subtitle support. We’re looking at what other subtitle support exists in phonon and will support as much as possible out of the gate.

      I apologize if this causes disappointment, but I wanted to err on the side of supporting and expanding the full capabilities of the KDE platform.

      Comment by jamboarder — July 9, 2010 @ 6:10 am

      • Ohhh, that it very unfortunate, as DVD watching is probably not the most common use case for a PC media player. Ripped DVDs or Internet downloads are.

        I realize for Americans subtitles may seem like “another special feature” that only a subset of users want. But you must realize that there are countries where people *only* watch the original version of movies, so not having them shuts out *entire* countries.

        As pointed out, another use case is anime watching, though *that* one really *is* a niche case.

        I really, really like Bangarang’s UI style and goals. I’ll begin using it as soon as it has subtitle support.

        Comment by tobami — July 23, 2010 @ 12:17 pm

      • Yeah, I’m bummed about releasing 2.0 without full subtitle support. Rest assured, I don’t consider subtitle support a special feature. For me it is essential. It is also for that reason why it *needs* to be supported in Phonon, so that the functionality is available across the entire desktop. In the short term it might make this app more appealing, but in the long term I’d rather provide solid app-level use cases for the work being done lower in the stack. It’ll get there, I just have to hold my breath a touch longer. 🙂

        Comment by jamboarder — July 23, 2010 @ 12:29 pm

      • Atleast Dragon Player supports internal subtitles (if that’s the right word, I mean the onces inside .mkv files etc.) I would guess it uses phonon for that? In that case it should be doable right? :p

        Comment by Teho — July 24, 2010 @ 11:58 am

      • @jamboarder: Nice to hear you consider it a priority. I had forgotten that you try to use the right technology for every piece of the software. That surely benefits KDE by showcasing and stressing it.

        Well, we’ll have to wait then.
        Keep up the good work!

        Comment by tobami — July 29, 2010 @ 1:16 am

  3. Are there any plans of getting Bangarang into KDE extragear(-multimedia)?

    Comment by pano — July 9, 2010 @ 4:34 am

  4. When is bangarang going to be localised like other KDE software?

    Comment by ivar — July 9, 2010 @ 5:14 am

    • We certainly welcome any contributions in this area.

      Comment by jamboarder — July 9, 2010 @ 6:10 am

    • It is fully translatable, and some translations have been added already (since 1.0 in fact). In an ideal world, the KDE localisation teams would all do he translations but because Bangarang is hosted outside KDE it won’t happen for every language. But still, progress is being made, check the list: http://gitorious.org/bangarang/bangarang/trees/master/translations

      Comment by Kristof Bal — July 11, 2010 @ 2:04 am

  5. Please, don’t feel offended by what I’ll say, but this “alpha” is a lot more stable for me tham 1.0 “release”. I was really waiting for this, but, as a quickie, can you add volume support? 😉

    Thank you so much for this great media player. It’s great to see it growing well.

    Comment by Ernesto Manríquez — July 9, 2010 @ 5:53 am

    • Thanks for the encouragement. Could you elaborate what you mean by volume support?

      Comment by jamboarder — July 9, 2010 @ 6:13 am

      • Support for making a song louder or softer, called volume. The volume slider hasn’t worked in my system since ever (Fedora 13).

        Comment by Alejandro Nova — July 9, 2010 @ 10:21 pm

      • BTW, what else do you expect me to do? 😉 Your strides showing us how the power of the platform mean some powerful features that only were to be expected in Amarok, for free, have brought a lot of homework to Amarok itself. I’ll test how my mileage varies in 4.5 RC2.

        Comment by Alejandro Nova — July 9, 2010 @ 10:25 pm

      • ahh, hehe, that would be a bug then. Not sure why it isn’t working for you. Feel free to file a bug report (http://code.google.com/p/bangarangissuetracking/issues/list) so I can get all the information to track down your problem. 🙂

        Comment by jamboarder — July 9, 2010 @ 10:26 pm

  6. I’m happy to see that the development continues! I tried to compile this alpha on openSuse 11.3 but i see this error:

    — Found Soprano: /usr/include
    — Found SharedDesktopOntologies: /usr/share/ontology
    — Found Nepomuk: /usr/lib/libnepomuk.so
    CMake Error at /usr/share/cmake/Modules/FindPackageHandleStandardArgs.cmake:70 (MESSAGE):
    Could NOT find KdeMultimedia (missing: KDEMULTIMEDIA_LIBRARIES
    KDEMULTIMEDIA_INCLUDE_DIR)
    Call Stack (most recent call first):
    /usr/share/kde4/apps/cmake/modules/FindKdeMultimedia.cmake:45 (find_package_handle_standard_args)
    CMakeLists.txt:7 (FIND_PACKAGE)

    What package i’m missing? Kdemultimedia (4) is installed.

    Comment by Lory — July 21, 2010 @ 8:35 am

  7. Btw., may I utter a slight development criticism?

    I think you are going way too fast with version numbers. 1.1 would be more appropriate considering the age and still small userbase of the project.
    Just that.

    Cheers

    Comment by tobami — July 29, 2010 @ 1:21 am

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    Comment by Patricia Sikkila — August 15, 2016 @ 10:51 am


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