Topic: MC 20 on Xubuntu 14.04 (Read 4729 times)

impalerau · « **on:** February 21, 2015, 04:15:54 am »

I've been waiting for this for s-o-o-o-o-o long. MC on Linux! Finally a chance to get rid of the last Windows box in the house. I installed MC 20 on a fresh install of Xubuntu 14.04 - selected some music files – they played. Same with video files. Great!

Except... full screen mode insisted on spanning the 2 monitors and playing the video in the middle. Switching out of full screen mode left the MC window spanned across the 2 screens. Window re-sizing and moving was pretty much impossible and the fonts looked like they came out of an old dot-matrix printer. But these are all minor issues in the grand scheme of things.

I wasn't expecting miracles (and my expectations were met)

I remember the early days of Media Jukebox in the late '90s when I first fell in love with it so I know the drill with being an early adopter

Then I started importing video files into the library from my unRAID server. Everything was going well for a while - then MC crashed. On restart it would start up OK. After a few seconds the network link to the server would fire up. A few seconds after that it would crash again. Over and over.

I did a full uninstall:

$ sudo apt-get purge MediaCenter20

followed by

sudo apt-get autoremove

...and reinstalled from scratch.

Same behaviour. Seems that the “purge” still left configuration files lying around pointing to the shares on my unRAID. No problem. I uninstalled again, deleted the .jriver directory from my home folder and reinstalled. Now it says my trial license has expired – in less than 24 hours!

Just as well I'm a die-hard JRiver fan

Somebody please help!

Also, are the re-sizing, window moving and screen spanning problems “normal” at the moment?

impalerau · « **Reply #1 on:** February 21, 2015, 04:30:23 am »

Just tried the "extend trial" feature. Got an immediate automatic email response with an extension key! Typed it in (no cut and paste).

Now it just says it's expired with no options other than purchase or restore

aoqw76 · « **Reply #2 on:** February 21, 2015, 06:19:11 am »

I run MC20 on Xubuntu 14.04 and it works perfectly - but I dont use it for video files, only music files.
Can you post screenshots of the window problems you experience?
If I get time I'll see if I get the same issues.

aoqw76 · « **Reply #3 on:** February 21, 2015, 06:38:45 am »

Quote from: aoqw76 on February 21, 2015, 06:19:11 am

I run MC20 on Xubuntu 14.04 and it works perfectly - but I dont use it for video files, only music files.
Can you post screenshots of the window problems you experience?
If I get time I'll see if I get the same issues.

That wasnt successful, MC crashed after I added my video folder to the library and it started scanning.
Will try again with a single sub folder.

JimH · « **Reply #4 on:** February 21, 2015, 06:42:31 am »

You may have a video file format that is causing trouble. Try importing a single file type at a time. If you find a file that causes a problem, keep a copy. We may need to see it.

impalerau · « **Reply #5 on:** February 21, 2015, 06:45:55 am »

I'll have to wait till I can start it first

I can describe them... If I tried moving the window by the title bar then it would first not respond at all and then fly all over the screen(s), usually coming to rest somewhere towards the bottom, with most of the window off the screen. At one point it ended up somewhere off the screens completely. Corner re-sizing could only be activated in the top left hand corner. But it wouldn't work. Just caused the whole window to move around. Edge re-sizing could be activated at the top or sides, but again usually caused the whole window to move rather than re-sizing.

I suspect that it may have had something to do with my dual displays. I ran it on a laptop with an attached monitor - 2 different resolutions. As soon as I played a video it went into full screen mode. When I exited out of that the window came back maximised across both displays (shouldn't even be possible). Not sure now but I think all the moving and re-sizing problems happened after that. At one point it even managed to disable my laptop display leaving me with just the monitor.

impalerau · « **Reply #6 on:** February 21, 2015, 06:50:46 am »

Well, at least the import problem is reproducible. That's progress.

Hi Jim. Can you help get me going with day 2 of my trial period?

aoqw76 · « **Reply #7 on:** February 21, 2015, 06:53:01 am »

OK working fine now I just selected a single folder rather than all my videos - there are a lot of home vids in there, and I suspect me interrupting the process was the cause.
Chose a sub folder of 20 odd files and it imported correctly.
Playback was fine, the video just filled the MC window.

mwillems · « **Reply #8 on:** February 21, 2015, 06:53:39 am »

Quote from: impalerau on February 21, 2015, 06:45:55 am

I'll have to wait till I can start it first

I can describe them... If I tried moving the window by the title bar then it would first not respond at all and then fly all over the screen(s), usually coming to rest somewhere towards the bottom, with most of the window off the screen. At one point it ended up somewhere off the screens completely. Corner re-sizing could only be activated in the top left hand corner. But it wouldn't work. Just caused the whole window to move around. Edge re-sizing could be activated at the top or sides, but again usually caused the whole window to move rather than re-sizing.

I suspect that it may have had something to do with my dual displays. I ran it on a laptop with an attached monitor - 2 different resolutions. As soon as I played a video it went into full screen mode. When I exited out of that the window came back maximised across both displays (shouldn't even be possible). Not sure now but I think all the moving and re-sizing problems happened after that. At one point it even managed to disable my laptop display leaving me with just the monitor.

Fullscreen dual monitor playback is not currently supported per Hendrik; I can confirm that it just plays across both screens. I've also seen the weird dual screen maximization after trying to play back on a dual head setup.

When you go to click and drag the MC window try pressing alt at the same time. Try only resizing on the right and bottom edges.

JimH · « **Reply #9 on:** February 21, 2015, 07:03:20 am »

Quote from: impalerau on February 21, 2015, 06:50:46 am

Well, at least the import problem is reproducible. That's progress.

Hi Jim. Can you help get me going with day 2 of my trial period?

I don't have a way to do that. Sorry.

impalerau · « **Reply #10 on:** February 21, 2015, 07:05:17 am »

Seriously? Ever?

Can I start again on a different machine?

JimH · « **Reply #11 on:** February 21, 2015, 07:17:12 am »

Yes. You could probably also reformat and reinstall the OS on the same machine.

bob · « **Reply #12 on:** February 21, 2015, 11:32:20 pm »

Quote from: impalerau on February 21, 2015, 06:45:55 am

I'll have to wait till I can start it first

I can describe them... If I tried moving the window by the title bar then it would first not respond at all and then fly all over the screen(s), usually coming to rest somewhere towards the bottom, with most of the window off the screen. At one point it ended up somewhere off the screens completely. Corner re-sizing could only be activated in the top left hand corner. But it wouldn't work. Just caused the whole window to move around. Edge re-sizing could be activated at the top or sides, but again usually caused the whole window to move rather than re-sizing.

I suspect that it may have had something to do with my dual displays. I ran it on a laptop with an attached monitor - 2 different resolutions. As soon as I played a video it went into full screen mode. When I exited out of that the window came back maximised across both displays (shouldn't even be possible). Not sure now but I think all the moving and re-sizing problems happened after that. At one point it even managed to disable my laptop display leaving me with just the monitor.

you should be able to use alt-left click to move and alt-right click to resize without trouble.

impalerau · « **Reply #13 on:** February 22, 2015, 02:16:55 am »

Round 2 begins... New machine. Another fresh install of Xubuntu 14.04. Laptop display disabled via NVIDIA X Server settings.

Thanks Bob. Moving and resizing using Alt key works perfectly. Well... almost. Can I assume that the whole window going white during resizing is "normal"?

Moving without the Alt key is OK most of the time. Really bad things start to happen when resizing from top or top left hand corner without Alt. The window just goes crazy - either extends way down below the screen, or moves off to the bottom right with just a tiny bit of it's top left corner showing in the bottom right of the screen.

I guess I'll have to start getting used to the Alt key

Will this be fixed?

Is this something to do with my Linux setup? I've been using Ubuntu (Xubuntu since Unity) since 2007 and would prefer consistency across my machines but if these problems do not happen on Debian Wheezy, I'll consided it just for an MC box.

Hendrik · « **Reply #14 on:** February 22, 2015, 07:51:52 am »

These problems happen on my Debian Wheezy box as well. I still hope for Bob to manage to fix them some day, as it makes for really bad usability when the frame goes crazy like this.

mwillems · « **Reply #15 on:** February 22, 2015, 08:32:37 am »

I don't think it's a distro issue; for me it seems to be a desktop environment issue. I get the crazy moving resizing behavior on lxde and xfce4 (in three different distros), but never on Gnome (in the same three distros). It may have something to do with composition as lxde has none, and xfce's stock compositor is a little wacky.

bob · « **Reply #16 on:** February 22, 2015, 01:50:42 pm »

Quote from: mwillems on February 22, 2015, 08:32:37 am

I don't think it's a distro issue; for me it seems to be a desktop environment issue. I get the crazy moving resizing behavior on lxde and xfce4 (in three different distros), but never on Gnome (in the same three distros). It may have something to do with composition as lxde has none, and xfce's stock compositor is a little wacky.

Interesting, I find it works great on my xfce system at home with no composition. It's definitely related to the desktop.
I may just disable the non-alt move/resize in the meantime. There's more important stuff to work on and it's fine with the alt key.
Yes, it's normal for the center to not be updated while moving or resizing.

Hendrik · « **Reply #17 on:** February 22, 2015, 02:45:29 pm »

I dont suppose you can make normal drag simply use the alt-drag magic, so that it works seamlessly?

impalerau · « **Reply #18 on:** February 22, 2015, 02:55:47 pm »

It's not the compositor. Mine is disabled. Could it be the bottom panel? I have one top and bottom. MC seems to be only intermittently aware of the bottom one. I've had to re maximize at times because the status bar disappears behind the bottom panel. Unfortunately its too aware of both panels in full screen mode

I normally use VLC for video playback and it happily full screens over the panels.

bob · « **Reply #19 on:** February 22, 2015, 06:45:05 pm »

Quote from: Hendrik on February 22, 2015, 02:45:29 pm

I dont suppose you can make normal drag simply use the alt-drag magic, so that it works seamlessly?

I don't think so because the system is driving in the alt-click scenario and I think it's disabling updates in that case.
I'm trying to disable updates in the click scenario but for some reason some desktop combinations ignore this disable.

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Author Topic: MC 20 on Xubuntu 14.04 (Read 4729 times)