Dutch referendum for the European constitution
In response to the new hype on Planet GNOME-NL, I’ll also give my opinion on the proposed European constitution, for which several countries will be having (or already had) a referendum in the next few weeks.
The European union is now commonly referred to as Europe, which is a great thing for our common identity. After two world wars, this collection of individual countries is now able to work together at strengtening their own and each others’ economy, and thereby increasing common wealth of every single person in this continent. To add up to this, “we” (the shared identity of all European citizens) are all able to freely travel between countries without requiring additional papers or visa fees, or even requiring currency exchange (OK, so the introduction of the euro also lead to price increases, but I don’t think you can blame the euro for that an sich; rather, the situation was abused by industry). So far so good.
Recently, however, this liberal giant was degraded to a social development platform by allowing new countries to enter the union without meeting the previously set requirements, instead of helping those countries to develop without already giving them membership. Instead of them being a featureful addition to the union, they were accepted for the mere reason that it was good for themselves. Imagine this in the meritocratic world of free software development. Would Red Hat package Blackbox on the Hurd and sell that because it’s good for the GNU? Of course not. They sell GNOME on Linux because that’s good for them; the relevant communities benefit from the newly added development power, leading to mutual benefit and happiness for both.
We don’t need the European union for social benefits; the individual member countries are more than capable of doing this on their own. They’ve always done it like this and should always do it like this. The purpose of the European union is to add something up to that, so that all members benefit from it.
The constitution will generalize international relations by having a common minister of foreign affairs, a single leader of the commission (the president), all things that I don’t think the European union was originally set up for, and that I don’t think it’s fit for. Also, it will lead to continuation of the developments that lead to the acceptance of countries into the union that should, as far as I’m concerned, have had more time to fit well with the rest of the European union.
I am in favour of Europe, I’m in favour of liberal economies, I’m in favour of free travel, shared currency, shared identity and all that; but currently, I see little reason to vote in favour of the constitution.

Pitfdll
Did a first release of Pitfdll. Let’s hope it gets into the famous package repositories soon.

World changes faster
With a wink to my previous post, I can say that at the same location, you will now find a working DLL loader that works in threaded applications, and thus in Totem, too. This means, in effect, that we now support QDM2 and WMV9. Thanks to Mike Hearn for helping me fix the threading issues!

I also updated the ffmpeg snapshot, which means that current CVS of everything now supports ALAC (Apple lossless), too.

Changing minds
Alone in the dark, I present you Pitfdll, which is a GStreamer plugin for Win32 DLL loading. I guess I changed mind - I don’t see a working free software WMV9/QDM2 decoder coming up anytime soon, no matter how close the ffmpeg people claim to be or how hard Fluendo is trying to release binary-only plugins. So we’ll have to come up with something else for the time being. The plugin reads WMV9, IV50 and QDM2. More can be added by adding two lines of code defining the DLL and the format it supports in GStreamer notation.

The rushers will notice that it doesn’t work in Totem, which is on purpose; Totem is heavily threaded, and threading breaks the DLL directly (see README). I’m unsure why, and would love to get some help from someone familiar with Wine or Xine (the DLL loading code is a direct cp -a from the Xine tree) code in this process (contact me on IRC in #gnome-hackers). Once that’s fixed, I’ll do a real release and add it to the repositories so people using Totem-GStreamer can finally enjoy those dreaded Apple.com trailers. :-).

Totem DVD & the like
Added some missing features (w.r.t. the Xine backend) in Totem/GStreamer today. One being manual aspect-ratio selection, partly with thanks to Laurens Buhler. The other being language codes, which I implemented in DVD playback. The result is that a media source with multiple audio tracks and language code support will now display proper language names in the audio/language menu. Same code is in place for subtitles yet, but then again, DVD subtitles don’t work yet, so it’s kinda pointless in a way. Jan (he’s working on that) promised me he’d make it working within a few days now. Then menus, and we’re done, GStreamer will finally have good DVD support.

As for the language code detection, I should implement it for mkv/ogm too, I guess.

Dutch Gnomeys
The people ate GNOME-NL have set up a private, unique and special Planet Gnome-NL which features your all-beloved GNOME hackers, but then only the special dutch flavour. Also, we’re currently working on an article in a national news magazine, which looks promising. The best of all this is that we’re doing cool stuff and are having fun at that. Yay!

Totem
So lately, I’ve been doing stability and finetuning work for Totem. It’s nice to see that it “just works” most of the time, I’ve wanted this kind of a media player for years. Looks good, works well and hey, it’s GStreamer-based. Other people are also helping, such as Christoph Burghardt, who’s working on a zoom feature using the GStreamer backend. I’m trying to get a friend into fixing the unimplemented aspect-ratio menu item, it’s his first C code, so it’ll require some guidance, but that’s good. In other parts, the nautilus properties page, thumbnailer and mozilla plugin all also received a lot of finetuning love. All in all, I think I can be a bit proud of the whole thing - even though it is still mostly Bastien’s work. ;-).