GTK MediaplayEr foR LINux

1. Overview

1.1. The main window

The main window is the heart of the GUI. It has a time display, a seek slider and several buttons. Clicking on the upper left corner of the window pops up a menu with several options. Clicking on the right corner quits gmerlin.

1.1.1 The display

The display shows the current time in several display modes as well as the current track name.

Left clicking on the time display changes the display mode. Display modes are:

Like almost any CD-Player, gmerlin shows the total time of the playlist if he's not playing.

Right clicking in the time display changes the repeat mode. Repeat 1 means, that the current track is repeated. Repeat all means that the whole playlist is repeated.

1.1.2 The Seek Slider

Drag this with the mouse to seek to another position in the track. The slider is disabled if no seeking is possible (e.g. during format conversions or if the input isn't seekable)

1.1.3 The Buttons

  This starts playback. If no track is in the playlist, an error message will come

  Stop playback

Jump to next track in the playlist

Jump to previous track in the playlist

Pause playback. To continue playback, you have to press pause again. Starting with version 0.1.4, you can also press pause if gmerlin is stopped. This will initialize all plugins, so you can start the actual playback with almost no delay.

1.1.4 The Menu

The main menu lets you select some global options. Most of them are easy to understand, the others are explained here.

Options->Force Software Sync: Disables synchronization with plugins. The only plugin which can be used for synchronization is the OSS audio driver. Select this option if, for whatever reason, the audio/video syncronization doesn't work with the OSS driver. Gmerlins software synchronization is based on GTimer and works quite ok.

Options->Auto Advance: If this is selected, gmerlin automatically plays the next track after the the last one was finished. If you have a playlist with 500 Mp3s and you want convert one single file to WAV, disable this, or gmerlin will make you a harddrive full of WAVs.

Options->Preferences: This shows a configuration dialog with much more options. Here, you can select Plugins, change colors, etc.

Gmerlin stores all configuration data in a configuration file in $HOME/.gmerlin/gmerlinrc

1.2 The Playlist

The playlist window shows the tracks, which can be played. The loudspeaker icon indicates that a track has audio, the TV-screen indicates video. Double clicking on a track causes it to be played immediately. You can select tracks with the left mouse button. Use the shift and control keys to select multiple tracks.

To change the order of the playlist, just drag single tracks up or down with the left mouse button pressed.

The playlist window is also a drag & drop target for the gnome file manager (and possibly others too). Drop an arbitrary number of media files onto the playlist and they will be added.

Right clicking onto a track pops up a menu with several options. You can add other files to the playlist, remove files, rename tracks and so on.

To speed up the program startup with large playlists, all important informations about the file (total time etc) are stored in the playlist file. This means, if a media file was replaced by another file with the same name but different content, gmerlin won't recognize this. If you want gmerlin to update the file information, select the desired tracks and chose "Track(s)->Refresh".

For plugins with a private playlist (e.g. Audio CD), the "Track(s)->Refresh" Function stops all playback and refills the playlist. You can use this, if you changed the Audio CD in your drive or just downloaded the CDDB infos with your dialup connection.

The track strings are normally created by taking the filename and removing the suffix. You can also let the playlist construct the names from the track infos. For this, go to the playlist section in the main config window. Here you can select "Use track info for playlist". The template tells gmerlin, how to construct the name. It is a simple string with the following placeholders:
 

%y Year
%a Artist
%A Album
%n Track number
%t Title
%c Comment

If you use %n, you can specify an optional number of digits (max 9): A placeholder of '%3n' will print the track number 3 as "003". The default template is "%a - %t" which will result in  "Beatles - Yellow Submarine". If you use Audio CDs, this method of creating track names is the default, if CDDB data can be found.

If Gmerlin exits, he saves the playlist in his own directory and loads it when he's started again.

1.3 The Video Window

The video window is part of the core program, it doesn't belong to the X11-Plugin. If you want just music, hide the video window by clicking on the right corner of the title bar.

Clicking on the left corner pops up a menu. Here you can select fullscreen mode. NOTE: For proper scaling in fullscreen mode, you need a graphics card with XVideo support and enabled "Check for XVideo" and (optional) "Force XVideo" in the configuration dialog of the X11 plugin. To exit fullscreen mode, press Shift-F.

1.4 Moving and resizing windows

Resizeable windows are resized by LEFT licking on the window border. All windows can be moved by RIGHT clicking on the window border or by clicking on the window title (left or right).