I know this may seem redundant, but I looked at all the threads on these two media players and to say the least the threads quickly became convoluted for me. As a Newbie, which would be the best and easiest to use? They all seem to have posted attributes and negatives, but from a users point of view, which one do you recommend based upon current experience? I am looking for straightforward use of music and videos. All I want to do is download the best one and move on and enjoy both music and video (Movies) on my N800. I have OS2008 installed. This should be a lot easier than I'm apparently making it, but I would like advice.

Thanks in advance.

MediaBox is a pretty front-end to mplayer.

Kagu and UKMP are both very pretty front-ends to mplayer.

Canola 2 is a very very pretty (but still very beta) front-end to the built-in media playback or mplayer.

Thank you very much. Things are now making sense to me. It appears that mplayer is the underlying app for all but Canola, if I understand what you said? Load mplayer first and choose the front end that suits me. Or wait for Canola 2 official release.
Thanks again, your post has been very helpful.

If you install whatever front end it usually comes with mplayer built in. Or it uses the framework so you won't have to load it separately.

Thank you, now I see what what I need to do.

Again, I appreciate your posst.

canola 2 may be beta , but there are no issues with me for using it and im picky as hell when it comes to media players... i strongly reccomend it.

Well, That's good enough for me. I may wait to see if there are any other followup posts, but I think I take your recommendation.

Thanks.

BTW, I think the N800 is great, it serves all my mobile needs. I travel to Europe quite a bit and don't like lugging my laptop everywhere, so this more than fits the bill. Now if only I could print from it directly to a usb printer, all would be sunshine.

The only real usability issues with the Canola 2 beta for me are:

• Album art and video thumbnailing are impossible to use for an inexperienced user; and even for experienced users the results are sub-optimal IME.
• No pre-configuration for the known media directories: /media/mmc2/Video, /home/user/MyDocs/{.sounds,.images,.videos} - this means a new user won't see any media found at all, with no explanation.
• The icons in the green theme are all round, and have no distinct outline making them very hard to distinguish intuitively. The graphite theme gets this right.

Hummmm. Looks as if Canola 2 is departing from my KISS philosophy.
I'll have to rethink my options.

thanks for your post.

album art works perfect for me , i wrote a guide on how to do it correctlyif youd like it just pm me with your email addy.