I've recently had the chance to play with an older Nokia Maemo phone. Having a full Linux (Debian, no less) distro on a phone is quite a treat, which explains why N900 has somewhat of a cult following. While trying to watch some video lectures, I discovered that the default media player (which is GStreamer-based) doesn't have any variable speed support. On the other hand, the players that do (vlc / mplayer and their front-ends) don't necessarily have hardware acceleration, because only GStreamer can access the DSP. As is the case with many embedded platforms, Gstreamer enjoys special support.

As PyGST / PyGTK are friendly platforms, I ended up coding pb2player, a variable-speed Gstreamer video player that works both on the desktop and on Maemo devices. I had to restrict myself to Python 2.5, which in practice wasn't too bad: there's no str.format(), and I had to use optparse instead of argparse (which is aggravated by gstreamer's buggy takeover of optparse once pygst is imported — one has to do all CLI processing before the import). The only cross-platform issue I've encountered is the appearence of GTK FileChooserDialog, which leaves too little room for long file names and sometimes makes it difficult to navigate to the parent directory.

The player is basic, but quite useful and solid in my experience. It supports m3u playlists (a priority given the FileChooserDialog woes), faster / slower playback and random seeking within the current video. The variable speed playback is nice for skimming the boring parts of a clip. Pitch control (a la mplayer's scaletempo, so that the voices in your head-phones don't start squealing at high playback rates) would be even nicer.

If you're going to try out pb2player, I suggest grabbing one of the releases or the stable github pb2player v1.0.x branch. After finishing the first workable version I decided to test-drive Qt, which seems to have a much more usable file dialog on Maemo; Therefore I refactored the app according (loosely) to MVA in order to be able to keep both front-ends (in the short term, because we all know how bridging different philosophies works out in the end). That experiment is not yet finished.

Once downloaded, you can run pb2player from its source folder, or you can build a Debian package to be installed elsewhere (but not on Maemo — see below). I put the Debian instructions in a mydebian folder, as having an actual debian/ in your source tree makes the package "native Debian", which gets in the way of real packagers most of the time. The make debuild target creates a .deb in /tmp based on mydebian.

To build and install a Maemo-suitable .deb, two more steps are required:

1. Maemo wants .desktop files in a non-standard location (/usr/share/applications/hildon), so mydebian/rules must patch the default $(desktopdir)
2. What is now called python-gobject-2 on a Ubuntu Precise system used to be called python-gobject in the past (which now refers to version 3). This is a result of Debian's moving target naming policies. The PC-generated playbin2player requires python-gobject-2. As a workaround, we can build a dummy package using equivs that depends on pgo-1 and provides pgo-2.

I've uploaded debian/rules and equivs control file for building python-object-2 (as well as the two resulting .deb packages) to this talk.maemo.org thread, so I won't include the details here. Upload and install python-gobject-2_1.0_all.deb and playbin2player_1.0.1-1_all.deb to your Maemo device and you can run pb2player.