Hi all,
This weeks' calibre release (0.8.69) contains beta MTP drivers. MTP drivers allow calibre to connect via USB cable to devices that dont show up as a disk drive. Examples of such devices are newer Android phones/tablets, like the Nexus 7 and the Kindle Fire HD.
calibre has drivers that work (I hope) on Windows Vista and newer and Linux. On Windows XP you may be able to get it to work by installing Windows Media Player 11 or newer and rebooting your computer. There is no support for OS X.
To enable the beta drivers, go to
Preferences->Pugins and click the
Plugin Tweaks button in the bottom right. Type the following text into the box:
Code:
test_mtp_driver = True
Click the
OK button and then click the
Apply button in the top left corner, and
restart calibre. Your MTP device should now be detected.
These drivers are beta quality, use them only if you are willing to help test and debug problems.
You should be able to browse the files on the device, send files to the device, delete files from the device and add files from the device to your calibre library. You can check where on the device a particular book is by clicking on the books' entry in the calibre device view, the path to the file will show up in the book details panel on the right.
The device driver is highly customizable. To customize it, simply right click on the device icon in the calibre toolbar (with your device connected) and select
configure this device. You can change:
- The list of formats to send to the device
- Where on the device to put files
- The template used to create filenames from metadata
- You can tell calibre to ignore a particular MTP device. Since most MP3 players are MTP devices, this is useful to get calibre to ignore them.
- Create rules that tell calibre to put files of different formats in different folders (format routing).
These drivers are very new and I have only done a limited amount of testing, on Linux and Windows 7, with one Android 2.3 and one 4.1 device, so there will likely be problems.
- If your device is not detected and you are on windows or linux, go to Preferences->Miscellaneous->Click debug device detection and post the output
- If calibre does not show all the books that are on your device, you will have to disconnect and reboot the device, the books should then be listed.
- For problems while interacting with the device, restart calibre in debug mode by right clicking the preferences button and post the debug log.
*The reason there is no support for OS X is that Apple does not support MTP and the open source MTP libraries that are used in linux have problems on OS X (they cause memory leaks and hang on computers with certain USB devices)