Music and media
The music and media story on Maemo comes down to one built-in player, the audio player that shipped in the 6.0 Fremantle release and stayed the heart of the platform until the N900 stopped selling. Everything else, the community codecs, the video clients and the MeeGo calls that ran on the N900, hangs off that core. Maemo Freak was an independent fan site that wrote about this stack as it developed, and this reference page, like the original, is an independent restoration: it is not Nokia, not Jolla, not maemo.org and not the original blog, and it hosts no firmware, no ROMs and no repackaged applications. The sections below cover the players that mattered in the Fremantle years, the codecs the platform accepted, the video clients that earned the label, and the MeeGo live video call experiments that pushed the N900 past its shipped role.
Best Fremantle players of all time
The best Fremantle players of all time start with the built-in audio player, which handled the Ogg Vorbis files the platform stored by default and played back through the device's 3.5 mm jack or the built-in speakers. The 6.0 release that carried it, the version that ran on the N800, the N810 and the N900, paired that player with a file manager and a 2 gigabyte of internal storage on the N810 and the N900, with an additional slot for a micro SD card that took the catalogue well past the built-in space. A shortlist of what owners actually ran, with the role each one filled, looks like this:
| Player | Role on the device | Media it handled |
|---|---|---|
| Built-in audio player | The default for everyday listening | Ogg Vorbis audio, MP3, AAC |
| Video player | The default for video files on the card | Theora, H.264, MPEG-4, AAC and MP3 sound |
| Community MP3 client | Library browsing and gapless-style playback | MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC |
| Streaming client | Internet radio and podcast streams | HTTP streams of MP3 and Ogg Vorbis |
Owners who wanted more than the shipped defaults usually kept the built-in player for the files they synced daily and added a streaming client for radio, a combination the community guides of the era treated as the standard Fremantle setup.
What you could actually install
What you could actually install on a Maemo device came from the Maemo repository, the package system that ran on top of Debian, with a few applications from the community archives that the main store did not carry. The Ovi Store was the official distribution channel in the Fremantle years, and it listed a small slice of the music and media catalogue: a handful of streaming clients, a few podcast players and a handful of codecs, all reviewed before release. The Maemo repository was wider, because community developers published directly to it, which is where most of the third-party players above came from. In practice the split ran like this:
- Codec packages: the F-Spot style codecs that let the player decode H.264 and AAC
- Audio clients: the library browser and the streaming client that owners installed side by side
- Video clients: the Theora decoder and the H.264 decoder, which shipped as separate packages
- Network clients: the streaming and podcast applications that pulled from an HTTP feed
A typical N900 in 2009 carried the 6.0 release, the codecs for one or two container formats and at most 2 community clients, a load that the 412 megahertz ARM processor handled without dropping frames on Ogg Vorbis playback.
Maps and navigation
Maps and navigation on Maemo were the second consumer of the media stack, because the navigation applications of the day, such as the open-source route planner and the GPS loggers, read the same GPS and audio layers the players used. The N900's Wi-Fi and the 2 gigabyte of internal storage held the map tiles and the soundtrack at the same time, which is why long rides paired a route planner with the built-in audio player. This is also where the device's media side met the MeeGo side, because the navigation layer was one of the pieces Nokia carried forward when the platform moved on. The N900's 3.5 inch touchscreen made the route display usable at a glance, and the 2.5 mm headphone socket kept the music under the voice prompts instead of on top of them.
How MeeGo Live video call worked
MeeGo live video call on the N900 was the most watched experiment in the platform's media history, and it worked as a 2-way video conversation carried over the device's Wi-Fi or 3G connection. The N900 carried a 3.2 megapixel rear camera and a 0.3 megapixel front camera, and the MeeGo demo used the front camera for the local feed and the rear camera for the far end, encoding the stream in H.264 and decoding the return stream with the same codec the video player already used. The result ran at a 640 by 480 resolution at a modest frame rate, enough for a face to fill the screen without pretending to be smooth, and it was a demo, not a shipped feature: it never left the MeeGo developer releases, and the commercial N9 that followed it in 2011 used MeeGo as its base without shipping this call client to customers. For owners who wanted to try it, the path ran through the MeeGo developer images that the community documented, which replaced the 6.0 system on the N900 and carried the call stack alongside the rest of the MeeGo media layer.
From Fremantle to MeeGo and beyond
MeeGo on the N900 was the bridge between the Fremantle years and the platform that followed, and it carried the media stack forward in a thinner form than the community had built. The N900's 256 megabytes of RAM set the ceiling for everything the MeeGo build could run, which is why the live video call demo and the video player shared the same decoder and never ran heavy third-party clients at the same time. The N9 in 2011 moved to a 1 gigahertz processor and 1 gigabyte of RAM, and its media player handled the same codecs, Ogg Vorbis, MP3, AAC and H.264, without the community layer. When Jolla later carried the MeeGo codebase into Sailfish OS, the player lineage continued there as well, and the audio stack owners had tuned on the N900 in the Fremantle years was the ancestor of what ships on a Jolla device today. The 6.0 platform itself kept running on the N800 and the N810 after the N900 launch, so a single owner could have carried the same Ogg Vorbis library across all 3 of those tablets for years before the MeeGo era closed it out.
The built-in player, the codecs it accepted, the clients owners installed and the MeeGo call demo form one continuous line: the 6.0 stack, the community additions, and the N900's second life as a MeeGo testbed. That line is the whole media story of the platform, and it is the story this page sets out, independent of Nokia, Jolla, maemo.org and the original Maemo Freak blog.