Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[mcewanw]

xhippo is a very resource-efficient versatile and extensible media player both in terms of its tiny download size and RAM usage.

Iif you have a directory (or directories) with audio and/or video media files in it, just drag it onto the main xhippo window and all the contained media files will all play in order (or random shuffled if so selected).

If you have albums of media files stored in subdirectories, they will indeed be included one after the other (or in the random track shuffle)!

You can also right-click on the main xhippo window and select Properties if you want to change startup defaults...

Can also right-click on any folder or media file in Rox filemanager and immediately send it to play in xhippo (thanks to shinobar's examples of how to arrange that in Rox configs).

Right-clicking in the xhippo GUI also provides another method for quickly adding songs or directories.

Rather than just trying the program, you might like to read some documentation. I recently stumbled across the following:

http://www.hep.by/gnu/xhippo/xhippo_toc.html#SEC_Contents

If you want to make xhippo your default audio player just edit /usr/local/bin/defaultaudio player and replace word "pmusic" with "xhippo". Alternatively just run the following script...

[greengeek]

Yes, that looks good - the problem with filename spaces is gone now. I did try playing an flv but it said "could not guess type" or similar. Is it easy to add types?

[mcewanw]

[mcewanw]

With this version if you right-click on most any media file you can immediately send the file to xhippo for playing (thanks shinobar). You can also ROX right-click on a directory containing mediafiles and sendto xhippo directly. Please uninstall any existing xhippo installation (including any xhippo config files (in /root/.xhippo, /etc, /usr/local/etc for example) before installing this new one below. You may wish to first back up any existing xhippo.config you already have.

If you want to make xhippo your default audio player just edit /usr/local/bin/defaultaudio player and replace word "pmusic" with "xhippo". Alternatively just run the following script...

[mcewanw]

Whilst quickly brushing up on gtk+ 2 programming I have discovered that the icon missing from the Restart Button is simply that the image refresh.png (size 16x16) is missing in /usr/share/pixmaps... I'll add that into the dotpet and reupload. There is still a coding fix required to make the pause button image to toggle from pause.png to play.png but that's not a big deal.

[mcewanw]

New version uploaded to first post in this thread with refresh icon now displaying correctly in first button.

I've added a screenshot to the first post.

KNOWN ISSUE REMAINING:

This xhippo compilation has one known problem: Pressing pause button should toggle icon between a play icon and a pause one. In practice this doesn't really matter (cosmetic only), but will try and fix that later.

[mcewanw]

Note that you can drop an many folders as you like onto xhippo (or load them from its dropdown menu) and xhippo will then play through them all one after the other or by random shuffle

[mcewanw]

I have now successfully hacked the C source code such that the Pause/Play button icon toggle between Pause and Play as desired. I'll upload a new dotpet with the changed gtk+ 2 code once I've tested further and maybe tidied up the code a little. I'll have to also test it with gtk+ 1 at some stage after which I'll also upload the patches.

[mcewanw]

New xhippo dotpet (modification 5) uploaded. This one includes toggling the icons on the Pause/Play button. I've also reverted the code to include the checkbox for Random/Shuffle, because I found the toggle button annoying because it didn't clearly indicate if Random mode was selected or not.

Note that xhippo includes the feature that when you Load (or drag and drop) a directory into its window ALL media files (audio and video) in that directory and subdirectories (recursively) will be added and played (either in order or randomly shuffled if selected)...

I've still to test the new additions and alterations I've made to the xhippo source code for gtk+ 1 version, before uploading source code patches, but tested ok so far for the gtk+ 2 version. Once I managed to get the pause/play button icons to toggle successfully I discovered more code was required for the handlers of the other buttons to avoid side-effects. The new dotpet posted now has all the additions and seems to work without error. Would appreciate further help with testing however.

[Tote]

Hello there, I've been trying the mod 5 version in Dpup Wheezy, I used Preferences to select ' start with random off' and 'start playing automatically', but the selections don't appear to be saved when XHippo is closed and restarted.

Also, I've been trying to play .wav files I looked in Xhippo config, I 'think' it's included but I can't play them... it's quite likely I'm doing something wrong, most technical things go right over my head.

Thank you.

[mcewanw]

[sc0ttman]

is it possible to use cvlc as a backend for this?

[mcewanw]

New dotpet uploaded (mod6). Fixed wav playing. Also set non-random-shuffle mode for the default because I preferred that too.

@Tote: I checked the original xhippo and it doesn't save Preferences either (only the mini gui state) so what you have asked for is a feature request. May or may not be easy to add - I'll look into that. The Preferences drop down is thus currently only useful for a running xhippo unfortunately; it just deals with the Preferences array in memory - a bit more difficult to save into a new xhippo.config, but possible to arrange of course. Also, I think autostart playing is only for songs entered on commandline, not for drag and dropped directories; the latter would be useful, so another feature request...
You can however change all default startup prefs in xhippo.config (just change no to yes or viceversa at the appropriate config lines). I still have to double check the source code to make sure saving capability isn't already in there - but I will.

[Tote]

mod 6 works nice with the random/shuffle turned off, and wav files enabled.

I'm not sure if it matters about the automatic play feature when using drag and drop... It might be nice, but since it only takes about a second to actually physically click on the first track to make it play, it sounds a little bit like nit-picking... I must be getting lazy...

I like using this, set it up in the background and let it run, hassle free. Very useful, thank you.

[mcewanw]

xhippo mod7 dotpet uploaded

Just a bit of fine tuning to xhippo.config because when playing a directory of videos I didn't want the window to jump to different positions as it did before:

The new default xhippo.config sets video window lower right corner in fixed position (near bottom and near right side). Remember that you can always toggle a video window to fullscreen simply by using keyboard key F. And you can jump back and forwards in a running video with left and right cursor keys, and pause with keyboard key P (or xhippo pause button).

You can adjust the default video window position by manually editing /usr/local/etc/xhippo.config (but take a backup first in case you mess up the format):

It is just a matter of editing the geometry parameters given to mplayer. For example, the default provided: