A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

DeeCodeUh · 2009-09-13 00:31:02

A new mplayer front end is being released soon, it has been in the development for over 4 years now.
It's based on Java and QT, and has an innovative interface by using tabs instead of extra windows.
Go ahead and install it and let me know what you think if you could.
I'd really like to get some people noticing that this exists, because it really deserves more attention than it's getting.

http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=24962

Last edited by DeeCodeUh (2009-09-20 15:37:33)

DeeCodeUh · 2009-09-13 02:43:35

This Media Player has also been largely developed on Arch Linux.
So Arch is one of the first distributions to have this packaged for it.
In my opinion, I can't think of a better mplayer front end.

csat · 2009-09-13 02:51:23

Hi

I tried to install it. The problem was with qtjambi that demanded installation of openjdk which conflicts with installed jre. I was afraid of removing jre so decided to abort.

Sorry.

Ranguvar · 2009-09-13 05:16:49

Looks very nice, but I worry about its future, as QtJambi won't be updated any more.

http://qt.nokia.com/about/news/preview- … -available

Nezmer · 2009-09-13 05:58:19

DeeCodeUh wrote:

and has an innovative interface by using tabs instead of extra windows.

Didn't the gnome guys joke about this when they announced that totem would get tabs? (It was April fools' day)

Why would someone want 4 videos playing in five different tabs at the same time ?

Opening 4 mplayer instances in a tiling wm makes sense as you can at least see all the videos but why tabs ?!

sand_man · 2009-09-13 10:33:02

I was going to try it until I saw the size of qtjambi

nDray · 2009-09-13 10:38:44

So basically Java is an advantage for the developers, not for the users...

techprophet · 2009-09-13 12:00:21

nDray wrote:

So basically Java is an advantage for the developers, not for the users...

Yes. If it's Java, I don't want it. Besides, why would I when I can just straight up run mplayer?

Ofc I understand that some people would want it, but I'm a console freak.

Gen2ly · 2009-09-13 16:11:15

Like the use of Qt but the java thing strikes me a bit awkward. I use java on a text-editor that I like a lot. Sure it takes a good time to load and a pretty reasonable spec machine but it's got a good number of features, features I need. Of course, a text-editor is a lighter application and an application like a movie player I expect to load quickly and be responsive. I haven't tried yet so maybe this doesn't fit in but I don't see have java can do this.

DeeCodeUh · 2009-09-13 17:32:54

Didn't the gnome guys joke about this when they announced that totem would get tabs? (It was April fools' day)
Why would someone want 4 videos playing in five different tabs at the same time ?
Opening 4 mplayer instances in a tiling wm makes sense as you can at least see all the videos but why tabs ?!

The tabs aren't for multiple mplayers, the tabs are for different modes. One tab is to view your video, another is to view the playlist, another is to view the console output, another is for settings, etc.

The main reason this was written in Java was to prove that something efficient can be written in Java.

thecombjelly · 2009-09-13 17:37:06

csat wrote:

Hi
I tried to install it. The problem was with qtjambi that demanded installation of openjdk which conflicts with installed jre. I was afraid of removing jre so decided to abort.
Sorry.

Interesting, I'm using openjdk without any problems. According to the PKGBUILD "java-environment>=6" either jre or openjdk should work if it is greater than or equal to version 6...

thecombjelly · 2009-09-13 17:41:33

Ranguvar wrote:

Looks very nice, but I worry about its future, as QtJambi won't be updated any more.

Yes this is something we are concerned about. But I think it is a little misleading to say that it "won't be updated any more". It just is not going to be updated explicitly by the trolltech (nokia), but rather it is now maintained by the community, question is how far will that go?

thecombjelly · 2009-09-13 17:45:34

nDray wrote:

So basically Java is an advantage for the developers, not for the users...

I disagree. I've always seen Java as just as much an advantage for the developers as the for the users. For a user it means that they no longer need to compile anything and they can run it on any system that supports Java (not much doesn't run Java). Also Java is much more fault tolerant. When a user is running a Java application and the application does something stupid, usually the program continues running and you get an error message somewhere. With something written in c++ and you get say a segfault, well there goes your application, it just disappears.

thecombjelly · 2009-09-13 17:59:09

Gen2ly wrote:

Like the use of Qt but the java thing strikes me a bit awkward. I use java on a text-editor that I like a lot. Sure it takes a good time to load and a pretty reasonable spec machine but it's got a good number of features, features I need. Of course, a text-editor is a lighter application and an application like a movie player I expect to load quickly and be responsive. I haven't tried yet so maybe this doesn't fit in but I don't see have java can do this.

I am one of the core auramp developers and when I joined the project (I was the second developer), the main aim was to prove the Java was able give as good of performance as c++. And if you use auramp, I think, for the most part, you can agree. Startup time is reasonable, in fact currently the majority of the startup time is connecting to a database (internal). UI responsiveness, is in my opinion, top notch. Cpu utilization is also really good. On my 1.8Ghz eee, I rarely see aura taking more than 1 or 2% cpu during media playback. In fact, I have compared it to other media players, such as: VLC, smplayer, etc, and aura almost always uses less cpu.

Unfortunately it isn't all perfect. I think our memory is higher than if we were to use c++, but being Java, one of the cool things you can do is actually tune the performance. If you have a computer with little memory but decent cpu, you can actually tune your Java vm, or we have settings with auramp itself, that will actually keep memory down, at a cost of slightly more cpu.

We have been internally debating whether to switch to c++. Originally our UI was done with swt (what eclipse uses) but when qtjambi came out we switched. And now we almost place more value in qt than in Java, so maybe sometime we will switch, especially if qtjambi is unable to keep up with qt in the community.

linkmaster03 · 2009-09-13 18:40:04

This looks like a great project! A very complete looking interface. The tabbing idea is cool as well.

Here is a screenshot: http://img222.imageshack.us/img222/563/13sepsun1431.png

The immediate downfall I notice is the startup time, which is ~7-8 seconds on my 1.73GHz Intel Dual-Core. I suggest removing the "System tray unavailable" pop-up on startup, because as a dwm user, it would get very annoying if I was using it to play movies a lot or something. I also think qtjambi will scare off a lot of Arch users particularly because of its size.

I'm looking forward to seeing this project advance. Keep up the good work.

Last edited by linkmaster03 (2009-09-13 18:41:13)

Gen2ly · 2009-09-13 19:47:16

Appreciate the well thought response, thecombjelly. I have tried java apps in the past and particularly for apps that have a good number of features, I have been disappointed by the performance of java (e.g. eclipse's responsiveness I've had trouble with). I have tried auramp now and can say that I very much like the gui of it. The quick access playlist being a big plus. As for performance it does run very well. Seems to behave as on par as stock mplayer does. Startup time does have a problem though and for fast access to small clips I'd have a problem with but for watching movies and tv shows I can see it's benefit.

tomk · 2009-09-13 20:32:03

thecombjelly wrote:

According to the PKGBUILD "java-environment>=6" either jre or openjdk should work if it is greater than or equal to version 6...

In this context, "java-environment" refers to a development environment, so that would be either openjdk6 from the extra repo, or Sun's jdk, which is in the community repo. If you just need the runtime, use "java-runtime" in the PKGBUILD - that is provided by both openjdk6 and jre.

csat · 2009-09-13 20:47:42

thecombjelly wrote:

csat wrote:
Hi
I tried to install it. The problem was with qtjambi that demanded installation of openjdk which conflicts with installed jre. I was afraid of removing jre so decided to abort.
Sorry.
Interesting, I'm using openjdk without any problems. According to the PKGBUILD "java-environment>=6" either jre or openjdk should work if it is greater than or equal to version 6...

@thecombjelly

Thanks for your comments. I tried it out, let pacman installs openjdk6 and remove jre. Aura started fine but I noticed that I couldn't see the graph information from stock market service that uses Java to plot. Back to jre everything got fine again. Something doesn't work with openjdk6 here along Swiftweasel 64 bits and I don't know how to fix unless removing openjdk6 and therefore Aura.

Thanks again.

DeeCodeUh · 2009-09-13 21:21:32

Ok, I stripped 85 MB off of the download size for this program making it about a 21MB download instead of 106MB.
It works for me, let me know if there's any problems.

thecombjelly · 2009-09-13 21:33:42

csat wrote:

thecombjelly wrote:
csat wrote:
Hi
I tried to install it. The problem was with qtjambi that demanded installation of openjdk which conflicts with installed jre. I was afraid of removing jre so decided to abort.
Sorry.
Interesting, I'm using openjdk without any problems. According to the PKGBUILD "java-environment>=6" either jre or openjdk should work if it is greater than or equal to version 6...
@thecombjelly
Thanks for your comments. I tried it out, let pacman installs openjdk6 and remove jre. Aura started fine but I noticed that I couldn't see the graph information from stock market service that uses Java to plot. Back to jre everything got fine again. Something doesn't work with openjdk6 here along Swiftweasel 64 bits and I don't know how to fix unless removing openjdk6 and therefore Aura.

Thanks again.

Ok deecodeuh fixed the PKGBUILD to be just java-runtime now so you should be able to use it with Sun's jre.

thecombjelly · 2009-09-13 21:38:18

Gen2ly wrote:

Appreciate the well thought response, thecombjelly. I have tried java apps in the past and particularly for apps that have a good number of features, I have been disappointed by the performance of java (e.g. eclipse's responsiveness I've had trouble with). I have tried auramp now and can say that I very much like the gui of it. The quick access playlist being a big plus. As for performance it does run very well. Seems to behave as on par as stock mplayer does. Startup time does have a problem though and for fast access to small clips I'd have a problem with but for watching movies and tv shows I can see it's benefit.

Yes, the startup time is one of the issues that we are currently working on a fix for. As a note, on KDE at least, if aura is your default media player, you can just click on a file in dolphin, for example, and it will load and start playing in the current instance of aura, therefore a hack to eliminate the long startup. (If this behavior is not desire it can be overridden with the -multi-instance flag...)

Thanks for the great comment and the review!

csat · 2009-09-13 23:07:00

Thanks. No openjdk6 conflicts now with jre but another issue was shown. I am using Arch 64.

From terminal I called Auramp and got this message:

$ auramp
"AuraMP requires Java version 1.6.0 or higher to be preinstalled
to work. If Java is installed then make sure that the 'java' executable
is available in the PATH environment."

I am using jre so I suppose everything should be fine. What's wrong then?

Thanks.

sand_man · 2009-09-13 23:34:43

csat wrote:

Thanks. No openjdk6 conflicts now with jre but another issue was shown. I am using Arch 64.
From terminal I called Auramp and got this message:
$ auramp
"AuraMP requires Java version 1.6.0 or higher to be preinstalled
to work. If Java is installed then make sure that the 'java' executable
is available in the PATH environment."
I am using jre so I suppose everything should be fine. What's wrong then?
Thanks.

Just check that it's in your $PATH

Surgat_ · 2009-09-13 23:34:47

You should relogin or source /etc/profile.d/jre.sh to include the java executable in $PATH

csat · 2009-09-13 23:41:30

Hi

Thanks for the help. I fixed it with $ sudo ln -fs /opt/java/jre/bin/java java

Running now auramp.

Thanks a lot!

Arch Linux

#1 2009-09-13 00:31:02

A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#2 2009-09-13 02:43:35

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#3 2009-09-13 02:51:23

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#4 2009-09-13 05:16:49

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#5 2009-09-13 05:58:19

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#6 2009-09-13 10:33:02

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#7 2009-09-13 10:38:44

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#8 2009-09-13 12:00:21

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#9 2009-09-13 16:11:15

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#10 2009-09-13 17:32:54

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#11 2009-09-13 17:37:06

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#12 2009-09-13 17:41:33

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#13 2009-09-13 17:45:34

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#14 2009-09-13 17:59:09

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#15 2009-09-13 18:40:04

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#16 2009-09-13 19:47:16

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#17 2009-09-13 20:32:03

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#18 2009-09-13 20:47:42

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#19 2009-09-13 21:21:32

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#20 2009-09-13 21:33:42

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#21 2009-09-13 21:38:18

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#22 2009-09-13 23:07:00

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#23 2009-09-13 23:34:43

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#24 2009-09-13 23:34:47

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

#25 2009-09-13 23:41:30

Re: A new mplayer front end is hitting the scene: Aura Media Player

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