Episode: 1910
Title: HPR1910: QMMP--The Qt-based MultiMedia Player
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1910/hpr1910.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 11:02:58

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This is HPR episode 1910 entitled QMP, the QT-MASED multimedia player.
It is hosted by Frank Mel and is about 12 minutes long.
The summary is, QMP is a simple media player inspired by WIMP and XMMS.
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Hello, this is Frank Mel.
Today I want to talk about QMMP, the QT-based multimedia player.
This project has been around for a while but does not seem to be widely known.
It's inspired by WIMP, now a little bit of background.
Back in my Windows days, WIMP was easily my favorite audio player.
I liked the small footprint, I liked the way it worked and I particularly liked the fact
that it was skinnable.
There were hundreds of WIMP skins.
I do like my eye candy.
I don't like flashing lights.
I don't like windows that shiver.
I don't like that sort of bells and whistles, but I do like my pretty pictures.
When I moved to Renitz, XMMS became my favorite media player.
And of course, you may know the XMMS project is default.
There is something called XMMS2, but it doesn't have those particular features that are
attracting me to WIMP and then to XMMS.
And as an added bonus, I could use my library of WIMP skins with XMMS.
And I have quite a few of them, including three or four that I made myself using a Nifty
Little Windows program called Skin App, which is still available.
So I was quite happy when I discovered QMMP.
The program runs on Linux, BSD, and Windows.
There doesn't seem to be a max being available, and I don't have a max, so I couldn't test
the BSD version to see if it would run on a map.
As locked down as max are, I rather doubt it, but if someone can find out and put it
in a comment to this podcast, you might help out someone else.
Now, I've already mentioned my history with WIMP and XMMS.
There are some other features that they have and that QMMP has that I like.
The interface is simple and clean.
It's playlist oriented, not database oriented.
It doesn't want to go stalking around my hard drive and hunting down all my audio files
and put them in a library or a catalog.
Instead, and it suits the way I listen, I normally listen to either audio streams or to
podcasts, and neither one of those items is really suitable for a library.
I have a library.
It's 400 vinyl discs ranging from the Jefferson Airplane to RIMPsey Quarset College,
Scheherazod, sitting in my house.
When I want to listen to a library, that's the library I use.
In addition to the other features I've mentioned, in BSD and Linux with an M-Player plugin,
you can play video.
The video will appear in a separate window, much like video did in Winapp once it had
video capabilities, and you can manipulate that window independently.
Like Winapp and XMMS got it out on the first time that time.
The QMMP window has three parts.
At the top there is a little player panel with the normal controls, fast forward, balance,
rewind and so on that you would commonly see on any player.
The middle is an equalizer and at the bottom is a playlist window.
Similar again to Winapp and XMMS, at the bottom of the playlist window are a series of buttons
for adding and removing and manipulating items.
In fact, the playlist window by itself, if that's the only one you choose to have visible,
there has a small player control window with play, pause, go to the end and rewind buttons.
It doesn't have the balance control, there are a couple of other controls that are in
the player window itself.
The buttons at the bottom there is a button for file where you can add a file directly
or an existing playlist, a removed button where you can remove an item or select it
items from the playlist, a selection item for selecting and deselecting items in the playlist,
a list button where you can look at details about the stream and sort the stream, and finally
a list button where you can load the playlist, save a new playlist, go to the next or the
previous playlist and so on.
There are also key bindings, a nice long list of them, I'll mention a few for examples,
the letter F, and as near as I can tell it's not case sensitive, you can add a file to play.
The letter U, you can paste in the URL of the stream, the letter D, you can navigate
to a directory and play it, and so on.
There's also a right click menu, if you hover the mouse over the player window and right
click you'll get a menu that provides various options for manipulating the audio and the
playlist.
There's also a list for each one of the corresponding key bindings.
There's two visualization plugins that I found and this is where you would turn them
on or off, an extensive settings I allow, and then the abide and exit dialogue, fairly
standard stuff.
The settings sub menu is where it gets interesting.
There's one for appearance and that's where you manipulate your skins.
If you want to add a skin, you click the add one, navigate to where it exists on your
hard drive, add it, and then it becomes available to be used.
You can't roll the skin directly from a file, it has to be put into this appearance dialogue
first.
There's a list of all the shortcuts, all the various key bindings.
Some options for displaying the playlist, an advanced button with some additional miscellaneous
options, an audio button where you can set gain and so on.
I haven't had to play with that at all.
There's a connectivity item where you can configure a proxy if you use one or need to
use one, and in the Windows version there's also a list of file types, why I don't know.
It also comes with a Stream Browser included.
Now that Stream Browser is a list of streams from IceCast.
I don't use IceCast all that much.
I have no idea whether it's a complete list, I don't really see how it could be, but
it's there and if you're an IceCast user, you'll probably find it quite convenient.
I have not found a way to add new streams to that list.
There may be one, but if so, it is hidden minifabum steep.
Oh, and I didn't want to mention to get to the Stream Browser, you right click open the
menu and go to Tools.
There's no bookmark function per say if you're an old Winapp user, you'll remember that
in Winapp you get actually bookmarked items.
However, there's a workaround because you can say Playlist.
If you have a number of items in the Playlist window or in my case, let's say a stream, you
can click the load risk button which sometimes abbreviated to load and select say Playlist.
The default name will be playlist.m3u.
The dialog seems to support all the major playlist formats.
I've tested both m3u and prs, I haven't tested the others, but I'm sure they worked
just as well.
I tend to use m3u simply because it's the default that pops up.
You get a dialog up to say the playlist, you change the name from playlist.m3u to
kcea, radio station stream, I like to listen to kceakcea.org, give it a really readable
name and save the file.
I have a special directory for saving my playlist too, so they're easy to find.
In addition to creating or manipulating a playlist file with QMMP, they're simple text
files and a very specific format, the format is published, you can manipulate them with
any text editor.
There doesn't seem to be any sort of gruey help I can find.
If you enter an terminal of the command QMMP, hyphen hyphen help, there's a rudimentary
help list that will pop up to the terminal, but generally the options are so self-explanatory,
I can see why there is no help, it doesn't need a fancy help.
I quite like this player, I'm able to use my old WAMP skins with it, it's versatile,
the sound is fine and I recommend if you're interested in something like the old XMMS,
give it a try.
If you go to the show notes, you will see links to the harm page, there's also links to
a Slack build, there's actually a Slack build script on the QMMP home page and there's
a Slack build at SlackBills.org.
If you're using a repo-based distro, the odds are it's in the repos, it was in the repos
for both Mint and Magia and also for PCBSD and FreeBSD, both have it in their repos, I've
been experimenting with BSD, there are skins for QMMP at the home page and you may also
be able to find it, some sites, some legacy Winapp skins, they're available for downloads.
I've also linked to the specification for the M3U format and several other items that
you might find useful.
I want to thank you for listening, if you want to get in touch with me, you can email
me at Frank at PineViewFarm.net, my website is www.pineviewfarm.net, PineViewFarm is the farm
in the Virginia countryside where I grew up, again, thank you for listening and I'll catch
you around the clock.
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