Features – Viewing Videos and Images
Whether you want to watch your favorite movie or your vacation photos – the Media Viewer app has many features to make this as pretty, convenient, and performant as possible. Here is a summary of what the app can do:
The Media Viewer app supports many image and video formats. By default all common formats should work; some special image formats may depend on the server setup. And some video formats may not be supported by your browser.
Clicking on an image or video opens the slideshow view; you can use it to watch all videos and images in a folder. Browse through them with the arrow keys, or by swiping through them.
The slideshow works both in the Files view and in Public Links. In the slideshow, you can display an image or video in fullscreen, and even zoom into it.
The difference between zoomed and unzoomed pictures is tremendous.
If you suddenly see an image sideways, no problem – the built-in rotation functionality can take care of that. Just press on the rotate button until it has the correct orientation:
The rotate button is very usefui to deal with upside-down cameras. Or squirrels.
Another cool thing is the native SVG support – the app automatically shows vector graphics in a proper size. You can use the zoom buttons to change the size, if another one would fit better.
The app is optimized for mobile support, of course – this way, you always have the perfect view on your images and videos, no matter which device you use. You can of course also use one of the mobile apps to look at them.
The new app supports mobile devices, as well as watching videos in the slideshow.
One big improvement towards the old gallery app is regarding performance: in the slideshow, the next and previous images preload automatically, while you are still looking at the current one.
This enables you to look through the files in peace – no waiting time, no lags.
So Which App Should I Install?
The old Gallery app remains in the Marketplace, and you can still install it with the Market app. But it is not maintained anymore, so please only use it if you really need it, e.g. for compability reasons.
To install the new app, you first need to disable and remove the Gallery app and the Video Player app in your ownCloud admin settings, under “apps”. The Media Viewer will then be default app to open images and videos.
Known Issues
The new app has some known issues. You can find them in the GitHub issues. One of them is important to know:
While new public links will work out of the box through the new Media Viewer app, existing Gallery public links won’t work anymore. Don’t worry, there is a workaround to fix this.
For this, edit your .htaccess file in the ownCloud root folder and add a new rewrite rule among the existing ones or with a new block at the bottom of the file:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/apps/gallery/s/(.*)$ /s/$1 [L,R=301]
</IfModule>
So have fun with the new Media Viewer app! We are always grateful for feedback, please open an issue at GitHub. If you want to contribute through writing code or testing, take a look at our community page.
