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Frequently Asked Questions
I'm going to try doing an FAQ page simply because any good project website should have one. I haven't had any actual questions yet so these are my guesses as to what people will run into most. Note: Reorganization done. Now it needs to be updated a bit:-)
- So you have a subversion repository. Great, now how do I use it?
- Everything installed fine, but where did you hide the executable?
- When I compile it complains about missing a file: /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.la!
- How come I push play and nothing starts playing?
- Why do I get weird or no output on videos?
- I'm stuck in fullscreen mode! I can't double-click and moving the mouse doesn't bring up the QUI window!
- When I try to play certain files, QUI plays silence for 4 seconds and then stops. What's up with that?
- How come some of my MP3's show up with the wrong time?
- Why do some file types (particularly Quicktime) always show up as 1:40 long when I know that's not right?
- Some of my DVD's show up shorter than they really are. Can't your stupid program get any lengths right?
- Forget the length, my DVD's won't play at all!
- Why don't my files with an extension of .MOV or .AVI show up in the file selection box?
- Do I need to use the button themes on your download page?
- I'm trying to use your button themes but all the buttons are blank.
- How do you pronounce QUI? Is it French? What does it stand for? Does anybody care?
- Why doesn't QUI have feature X?
- Various other random misbehavior by QUI...
- What to include in a bugreport.
Q. So you have a subversion repository. Great, now how do I use it?
A. Well, if you happen to be running a Gentoo or other system configured pretty much exactly like mine, you can just type make in the qui4mplayer directory (which will be created if you follow the SourceForge instructions for using subversion - if you change them you should know which directory you need). If your system isn't exactly like mine, you can go into the directory, type "qmake -project" and "qmake" before "make" and then it should compile for you. Obviously that requires you to have QT development tools installed, and how you do that depends on your distro. Let me know if you have any problems since I've only tested this on one system of my own.
Q. Everything installed fine, but where did you hide the executable?
A. This appears to have changed, possibly because of KDevelop updates. The RPM puts the executable in a nice normal place (/usr/bin) so you shouldn't have any trouble finding it. On Gentoo the source install puts it in my normal KDE binaries directory, so again you should have little or no trouble. I won't swear to anything though. If you're in desperate need and can't find it anywhere, a "find / | grep qui" will tell you where it is (doing that as root will save you some "unreadable" error messages too).
Q. When I compile it complains about missing a file: /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.la!
A. It seems as though the nVidia drivers remove this file for some reason, as it has given me this error every time I have installed them. The workaround is simply to copy the libGL.la in your /usr/lib directory (which hopefully exists) to /usr/X11R6/lib. This is another problem that I haven't had since I started using Gentoo, so maybe it won't be exactly the same for you. If you're reading this though, chances are that it is.:-)
Q. How come I push play and nothing starts playing?
A1. You haven't added any files to the playlist. Nothing should happen in this situation, but then you could probably guess that.
A2. More likely, MPlayer is not anywhere in your PATH. Try running QUI from the command-line and see if an error message about this is printed out. In this situation QUI should exit immediately.
A3. If QUI seems to hang and becomes unresponsive after clicking play make sure that you don't have another instance of either QUI or MPlayer running at the same time. MPlayer doesn't seem to like sharing the sound card with itself (or any other program for that matter). A possible workaround is to add "-ao null" to your MPlayer options in the options window, which will shut off sound but allow you to play a video if that's what you're trying to do.
Q. Why do I get weird or no output on videos?
A. Well, that's a very good question and one I've been trying to answer myself. This isn't something I can reproduce reliably, and it seems as though restarting X takes care of the problem as I've encountered it. However, starting QUI from the command-line also seems to do the trick, and MPlayer plays the video just fine on its own. Sorry I don't have a better answer.
Q. I'm stuck in fullscreen mode! I can't double-click and moving the mouse doesn't bring up the QUI window!
A. Theoretically this shouldn't happen, but especially with all the different WM's it is possible. If it does happen simply click on the MPlayer window and press the 'f' key on the keyboard. Note that this is not recommended except in this situation because it messes up the synchronization with QUI (of course, that's already happened if you're stuck in fullscreen:-(. If it becomes a chronic problem you can shut off this behavior in the defaults.conf file by removing the -fstype line and the line immediately following. It will then be impossible to display the QUI window while in fullscreen however.
Q. When I try to play certain files, QUI plays silence for 4 seconds and then stops. What's up with that?
A. This means that for some reason MPlayer couldn't open the file you're playing. I've run into this with a couple of MP3's that I have, and there's not much I can do about it. If you want to know why this happened, you can check out the qui.log file in your ~/.qui directory. It contains all of the output from MPlayer plus a few QUI messages.
Q. How come some of my MP3's show up with the wrong time?
A. They are probably variable bitrate. VBR files mess up the MPlayer file identification so the time will be incorrect. Any time QUI thinks that it finds one of these it assumes a constant bitrate of 128kbps to estimate the time, but it's highly unlikely that this will be correct.
Q. Why do some file types (particularly Quicktime) always show up as 1:40 long when I know that's not right?
A. Check out the readme under the known bugs section. These are files that MPlayer sees having a length of 0, so QUI can't seek normally in them. 1:40 is 100 seconds, so it seeks to the appropriate percentage of the file instead. Obviously the time while playing is going to be wrong under these circumstances.
Q. Some of my DVD's show up shorter than they really are. Can't your stupid program get any lengths right?
A. Doesn't seem like it, does it? Again, MPlayer for some reason reports the lengths that you see, so I can only do so much. The best solution I've been able to come up with is integrating use of lsdvd to get an accurate length and then adjusting for MPlayer's issues. In other words, if you install lsdvd the times will be right and seeking will work correctly.
Q. Forget the length, my DVD's won't play at all!
A1. Make sure that you indeed have a DVD drive and a DVD is in said drive. Also, check that you didn't put it in upside down. Not trying to insult your intelligence, but you'd be surprised how often it happens:-)
A2. Make sure that you have a /dev/dvd item in your /dev folder. If you don't, you can make a symlink from your DVD drive to /dev/dvd by doing something like this (as root): "ln -s /dev/hdc /dev/dvd" replacing /dev/hdc with the appropriate entry for you DVD drive.
A3. Check the permissions on your DVD drive's entry in /dev (mine is /dev/hdc). The user you are trying to play the DVD with must have at least read permission on that drive. This is something I personally have run into and I have no idea why I didn't have permission to read a disk drive. Seems stupid to me.
A4. Download and install libdvdcss. Google should help you find it. Without it you can't play DVD's in Linux if they're encrypted. Thank you MPAA.
Q. Why don't my files with an extension of .MOV or .AVI show up in the file selection box?
A. Annoyingly enough, the QT file dialogs match in a case-sensitive manner, so .avi != .AVI. Since I'm not going to include every possible combination of upper and lower case in the filter I just use lower case. You can still use the All Files filter to select these however.
Q. Do I need to use the button themes on your download page?
A. Button themes are not required, but IMHO they do look nicer. Please feel free to submit your button images to me if you create your own images for the buttons. I'll be happy to post them.
Q. I'm trying to use your button themes but all the buttons are blank.
A. First, make sure that you have a Background.png file in ~/.qui/Buttons (and keep in mind that the filenames are case sensitive). If you do not, the buttons will not display correctly. Even a solid color image is fine (but make sure it matches the dimensions listed in the readme). If you've checked that, make sure that the ImageMagick program "convert" is somewhere in your path. QUI uses that to blend transparent button images with the background, so it's very important. If all of that is okay, then shoot me an e-mail. The button image system is still rather experimental and I'm not positive it will work on all systems.
Q. How do you pronounce QUI? Is it French? What does it stand for? Does anybody care?
A. No to all questions...er, that doesn't make sense (it did at one point in the writing of this;-). QUI is pronounced as you would say the letters q and e, so phonetically something like this: kyooee. I am pretty sure that's not the French pronunciation of the word, so no it's not French. It actually stands for QT GUI, although I came up with that after the fact. Originally I just took the acronym GUI and replaced the first letter with Q for QT. And to answer my own question: nobody cares!:-)
Q. Why doesn't QUI have feature X?
A. Because you haven't requested it yet! That and I must not use it much or it would already be in there. I'm open to feature requests but I won't guarantee that everything will get implemented of course. Skinning is not going to happen in the near future. Sorry. Unless people request it:-)
Q. Various other random misbehavior by QUI...
A. E-Mail Me! I would actually love to hear a bugreport because that would mean that someone had actually managed to install and run QUI:-)
Q. What should I include in said e-mail?
A. Good question, thanks for asking. There actually is a log file in your ~/.qui directory called (creatively enough) qui.log that may be helpful. Make sure you make a copy of it though because it gets overwritten every time QUI is started. Naturally a good description of the problem is a must as well. If the problem is repeatable, setting the Debug option in defaults.conf to true will make the log file include quite a bit more information.
A. Well, if you happen to be running a Gentoo or other system configured pretty much exactly like mine, you can just type make in the qui4mplayer directory (which will be created if you follow the SourceForge instructions for using subversion - if you change them you should know which directory you need). If your system isn't exactly like mine, you can go into the directory, type "qmake -project" and "qmake" before "make" and then it should compile for you. Obviously that requires you to have QT development tools installed, and how you do that depends on your distro. Let me know if you have any problems since I've only tested this on one system of my own.
Q. Everything installed fine, but where did you hide the executable?
A. This appears to have changed, possibly because of KDevelop updates. The RPM puts the executable in a nice normal place (/usr/bin) so you shouldn't have any trouble finding it. On Gentoo the source install puts it in my normal KDE binaries directory, so again you should have little or no trouble. I won't swear to anything though. If you're in desperate need and can't find it anywhere, a "find / | grep qui" will tell you where it is (doing that as root will save you some "unreadable" error messages too).
Q. When I compile it complains about missing a file: /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.la!
A. It seems as though the nVidia drivers remove this file for some reason, as it has given me this error every time I have installed them. The workaround is simply to copy the libGL.la in your /usr/lib directory (which hopefully exists) to /usr/X11R6/lib. This is another problem that I haven't had since I started using Gentoo, so maybe it won't be exactly the same for you. If you're reading this though, chances are that it is.:-)
Q. How come I push play and nothing starts playing?
A1. You haven't added any files to the playlist. Nothing should happen in this situation, but then you could probably guess that.
A2. More likely, MPlayer is not anywhere in your PATH. Try running QUI from the command-line and see if an error message about this is printed out. In this situation QUI should exit immediately.
A3. If QUI seems to hang and becomes unresponsive after clicking play make sure that you don't have another instance of either QUI or MPlayer running at the same time. MPlayer doesn't seem to like sharing the sound card with itself (or any other program for that matter). A possible workaround is to add "-ao null" to your MPlayer options in the options window, which will shut off sound but allow you to play a video if that's what you're trying to do.
Q. Why do I get weird or no output on videos?
A. Well, that's a very good question and one I've been trying to answer myself. This isn't something I can reproduce reliably, and it seems as though restarting X takes care of the problem as I've encountered it. However, starting QUI from the command-line also seems to do the trick, and MPlayer plays the video just fine on its own. Sorry I don't have a better answer.
Q. I'm stuck in fullscreen mode! I can't double-click and moving the mouse doesn't bring up the QUI window!
A. Theoretically this shouldn't happen, but especially with all the different WM's it is possible. If it does happen simply click on the MPlayer window and press the 'f' key on the keyboard. Note that this is not recommended except in this situation because it messes up the synchronization with QUI (of course, that's already happened if you're stuck in fullscreen:-(. If it becomes a chronic problem you can shut off this behavior in the defaults.conf file by removing the -fstype line and the line immediately following. It will then be impossible to display the QUI window while in fullscreen however.
Q. When I try to play certain files, QUI plays silence for 4 seconds and then stops. What's up with that?
A. This means that for some reason MPlayer couldn't open the file you're playing. I've run into this with a couple of MP3's that I have, and there's not much I can do about it. If you want to know why this happened, you can check out the qui.log file in your ~/.qui directory. It contains all of the output from MPlayer plus a few QUI messages.
Q. How come some of my MP3's show up with the wrong time?
A. They are probably variable bitrate. VBR files mess up the MPlayer file identification so the time will be incorrect. Any time QUI thinks that it finds one of these it assumes a constant bitrate of 128kbps to estimate the time, but it's highly unlikely that this will be correct.
Q. Why do some file types (particularly Quicktime) always show up as 1:40 long when I know that's not right?
A. Check out the readme under the known bugs section. These are files that MPlayer sees having a length of 0, so QUI can't seek normally in them. 1:40 is 100 seconds, so it seeks to the appropriate percentage of the file instead. Obviously the time while playing is going to be wrong under these circumstances.
Q. Some of my DVD's show up shorter than they really are. Can't your stupid program get any lengths right?
A. Doesn't seem like it, does it? Again, MPlayer for some reason reports the lengths that you see, so I can only do so much. The best solution I've been able to come up with is integrating use of lsdvd to get an accurate length and then adjusting for MPlayer's issues. In other words, if you install lsdvd the times will be right and seeking will work correctly.
Q. Forget the length, my DVD's won't play at all!
A1. Make sure that you indeed have a DVD drive and a DVD is in said drive. Also, check that you didn't put it in upside down. Not trying to insult your intelligence, but you'd be surprised how often it happens:-)
A2. Make sure that you have a /dev/dvd item in your /dev folder. If you don't, you can make a symlink from your DVD drive to /dev/dvd by doing something like this (as root): "ln -s /dev/hdc /dev/dvd" replacing /dev/hdc with the appropriate entry for you DVD drive.
A3. Check the permissions on your DVD drive's entry in /dev (mine is /dev/hdc). The user you are trying to play the DVD with must have at least read permission on that drive. This is something I personally have run into and I have no idea why I didn't have permission to read a disk drive. Seems stupid to me.
A4. Download and install libdvdcss. Google should help you find it. Without it you can't play DVD's in Linux if they're encrypted. Thank you MPAA.
Q. Why don't my files with an extension of .MOV or .AVI show up in the file selection box?
A. Annoyingly enough, the QT file dialogs match in a case-sensitive manner, so .avi != .AVI. Since I'm not going to include every possible combination of upper and lower case in the filter I just use lower case. You can still use the All Files filter to select these however.
Q. Do I need to use the button themes on your download page?
A. Button themes are not required, but IMHO they do look nicer. Please feel free to submit your button images to me if you create your own images for the buttons. I'll be happy to post them.
Q. I'm trying to use your button themes but all the buttons are blank.
A. First, make sure that you have a Background.png file in ~/.qui/Buttons (and keep in mind that the filenames are case sensitive). If you do not, the buttons will not display correctly. Even a solid color image is fine (but make sure it matches the dimensions listed in the readme). If you've checked that, make sure that the ImageMagick program "convert" is somewhere in your path. QUI uses that to blend transparent button images with the background, so it's very important. If all of that is okay, then shoot me an e-mail. The button image system is still rather experimental and I'm not positive it will work on all systems.
Q. How do you pronounce QUI? Is it French? What does it stand for? Does anybody care?
A. No to all questions...er, that doesn't make sense (it did at one point in the writing of this;-). QUI is pronounced as you would say the letters q and e, so phonetically something like this: kyooee. I am pretty sure that's not the French pronunciation of the word, so no it's not French. It actually stands for QT GUI, although I came up with that after the fact. Originally I just took the acronym GUI and replaced the first letter with Q for QT. And to answer my own question: nobody cares!:-)
Q. Why doesn't QUI have feature X?
A. Because you haven't requested it yet! That and I must not use it much or it would already be in there. I'm open to feature requests but I won't guarantee that everything will get implemented of course. Skinning is not going to happen in the near future. Sorry. Unless people request it:-)
Q. Various other random misbehavior by QUI...
A. E-Mail Me! I would actually love to hear a bugreport because that would mean that someone had actually managed to install and run QUI:-)
Q. What should I include in said e-mail?
A. Good question, thanks for asking. There actually is a log file in your ~/.qui directory called (creatively enough) qui.log that may be helpful. Make sure you make a copy of it though because it gets overwritten every time QUI is started. Naturally a good description of the problem is a must as well. If the problem is repeatable, setting the Debug option in defaults.conf to true will make the log file include quite a bit more information.
Last modified: Saturday, 14-Apr-2007 18:34:05 UTC