MotionMonkey 1.1.0 has been released for Android and Desktop, and it’s the first version with comprehensive settings for adjusting videos, complete subtitle support and a night theme, among other things you might want to discover by yourself:
As you might know, Monkey is an innovative player designed to stream videos from a single query. It’s more easy to use and accessible than MB. It’s both easier to describe and to try, and I think it’s a cool entry towards everything I’ve been doing surrounding video streaming in the past few years. Sometimes, less is more, and small is beautiful.
This release is an important new milestone for me. Surely, MotionBox has been supporting most of Monkey’s feature for the past few months, but that’s the first time I’m actually pushing such a complete player on the Android platform. By supporting the mobile platform I’m also improving the shared codebase, namely the Sky application kit (Sky).
When it comes to features, having direct access to video resources through DuckDuckGo for Youtube, Dailymotion, Vimeo and SoundCloud without ever seeing any sort of advertisement is quite a joy already. It’s also liberating having a software that serves your best interest at all time, and certainly a breakout from what we are more and more used to on the web.
But when it comes to BitTorrent streaming, having the possibility of discovering, extracting and streaming a torrent directly is simply a unique feature. And it’s something you will not find anywhere else, especially with such a degree of simplicity.
Couple this with direct subtitle retrieval and we’ve never been closer to the universal player we had in mind when we first discovered the Internet (and were not poluted by private silos and SaSS considerations).
All of this thanks to the fantastic technology I’m integrating:
- the Qt framework, the cornerstone for multiplatform and dynamic UI(s).
- libVLC, that gives you a tremendously adaptative player no matter what you’re throwing at it.
- libtorrent, which is a state of the art C implementation of the BitTorrent protocol.
Unlike MotionBox, the MotionMonkey client is not OpenSource, even though it’s entirely based on Free Software namely the Sky application kit that’s shared between everything I’m doing surrounding multimedia. I’m mostly closing what’s related to QML and GUI specific components for Monkey (a very small chunk of the codebase).
What’s too good to be closed is openly accessible (and open to contributions), namely the entire streaming engine, whether it’s retrieving, parsing data, or playing them through a high performance (BitTorrent ready) player. And it’s my gift to the Internet community that brought me wonderful tools to build upon. I’m proud of hackers for reminding us that sharing matters, even in a scarcity based society.
I’m closing Monkey for now because I want to give a shot at selling a proprietary client fully based on Free Software technologies. I’m fed up of the support and service models that always come attached to OpenSource (and tends to corrupt it). I want to go back to something more simple, that merges the ethics of Free Software, together with the reality we’re living in 2021.
So, I’ll give a shot at selling a beautiful and fine tuned interface based on what I’ve been developing for almost a decade. Hopefully you’ll give value having a beautiful player like this on your phone that serves its user at all time. If not, feel absolutely free to use MotionBox as it will get better and better along the way. Most of my codebase stays open no matter what.
But for now MotionMonkey is entirely free (as in free beer), even on Android.
Please give it a try, and don’t hesitate to give me feedback.
Have a beautiful day, and happy hacking !
