QUI Information

  What is QUI for MPlayer? QUI is a GUI (I know, it's a nasty rhyme) for the outstanding command-line media player MPlayer. As of this writing, it was up to version 1.0 which should be completely bug-free (emphasis on the "should be" :-). It was mostly written to satisfy my need for a graphical media player in Linux that supported the WMA format, which I had ripped all of my CD's to in Windows. All of the other GUI's for MPlayer that I could get installed had playlist support that I found lacking, so QUI tries to emphasize the usability of the playlist. QUI is not a super customizable program that will cater to everyone, nor is it probably full-featured enough for people with thousands of audio/video files, but for my modest collection it is perfect (at least for me:-). It simply intends to provide a fairly simple but robust interface for playing music and movies in MPlayer.

Features

  QUI currently has all of the basic media player functions one would expect to find. The basic controls (play, pause, stop, volume, fullscreen, playlist manipulation) are all functioning. To some extent, it supports all of the file formats that MPlayer does (including DVD and VCD's), although some have minor problems playing due to issues with getting the file information from MPlayer.

Wish List

• I still need to add some more options to the Options dialog. I would like to have at least a vo and ao selection dropdown so people aren't required to dig into the command-line options to use them.
• Cleanup the interface. I need to move the DVD and VCD spinboxes to a separate dialog accessible from the playlist, since that is really where they belong anyway. Because this would add too much junk to the playlist, I think all of the playlist buttons are going to become a menu that will let you access the same functions from a single button (an extra click, but it'll look a lot nicer, I think). - Done as of 1.51b. Will try to remember to remove this when a stable version is released.
• Editing of ID3 tags is something I've wanted to do since QUI was started, and I should be able to get it added eventually.
• On the interface note, I've found some promising looking examples of skinning that I may be able to use. That still remains to be seen though. This will likely happen after the above items because they will all take a lot less time and I'd like to have them available before I dive into this.
• I want to implement some functionality for using playlists that can be downloaded from web sites (like .asx or .m3u). Right now QUI just plain can't play them, and while I don't think it will ever do a great job I think I can get some simple support built-in.
• It turns out that using -wid was more of a pain than it was worth, so it's not going to happen. I may put it in as an option someday, but it FUBAR's fullscreen play in a lot of different ways, so I'm not going to make it default.
• Oh, and replace iTunes as the audiophile's player of choice (actually, I don't want to do that, but...:-)

A bit of history:

  The history of QUI is not very long at this point. It started from a combination of my need for a better MPlayer GUI as mentioned above and a class project which conveniently allowed me to work on it during school time. I can guarantee that I won't post the presentation or paper because they are both so outdated now that it's almost embarrassing. Anyhow, I wasn't originally sure if I wanted to try to release it, as I am a newbie in Linux, so I don't know a whole lot about software development for it. However, I decided that I had done enough programming in Windows that I could probably make a go of it, and since QUI turned out pretty well, I thought I'd try to give a little something back to the open source community. So here it is. I'm sure that's all you wanted to know about QUI and more.

Mar. 25, 2004 QUI hit 500 downloads on SF.net. It's amazing how much exposure a project can get on SF.net.

Last modified: Saturday, 14-Apr-2007 18:34:06 UTC