Christian Schaller

After my last blog entry where I let it be known that a group of us left Fluendo I realized that I had forgotten to put up my new (old) contact information. So people who need to reach me/us can contact me on uraeus*at*gnome*org.

I also want to say thank you to all those who sent us emails and messages of support and best wishes, much appreciated.

So as of today Wim Taymans, Edward Hervey and myself are no longer working for Fluendo. The same goes for Tim Muller who has been working as a contractor for Fluendo for a long time now. The reasons for us deciding to leave are many, but essentially I guess the time had come when we felt our prospects outside Fluendo were better than the ones offered inside. Our exact plans are not set in stone yet, but one likely outcome is that we set up our own company doing various kind of software and services around GStreamer, more on that in the coming weeks.

Managed to get myself embroiled in a little email exchange with Linus about configurability options and GNOME. Seesm that little exchange even managed to hit Slashdot.
The misconception that I feel Linus have and a lot of the people posting on Slashdot is that patches that adds configuration options to GNOME would automatically get rejected. This is simply false.

At best this is an extrapolation of the quite strict policy of Metacity in particular and the general GNOME policy of ‘no GUI options before thinking’. This policy did come into effect with GNOME 2.x and it came about both due to UI design usability discussions, but also as a result of seeing our config menu’s get clogged with options which mostly where there due to bugs, missing features and a heterogen deployment environment below GNOME. It was decided to focus on actually trying to solve these lower level issues instead of offering config options to work around them. A talk by Jim Getty’s at GUADEC called ‘Draining the swamp’ being considered the call to arms on that issue. Projects such as HAL, the rejuvenated X.org effort and many other freedesktop projects came about almost as a direct consequence of this.

There was also some misconceptions on the Sawfish to Metacity switch that happened in this time period. It is not correct to say that Sawfish got replaced by Metacity due to it being deciding its high degree of configurability was bad, far from it. Sure there
where people who felt Sawfish went a bit overboard in that regard, but that was not the reason it got ditched as the default GNOME window manager. The reason for that was simply that after Eazel went backrupt and Sawfish maintainer John Harper had to find a new job, he ended up at Apple. And thus due to Apple corporate policy, and probably long hours at work, he couldn’t maintain Sawfish anymore. The troublesome thing about Sawfish was that it was written in its own Lisp dialect so as part of Sawfish you got both an extra lisp interpreter and GTK+ bindings for it. This meant that the C/C++ skills in the GNOME community didn’t lend themselves well to fixing bugs in Sawfish.
The two libraries and Sawsfish itself thus went unmaintained as John went away and nobody where interested/felt qualified to take it over. Thus the GNOME developers had to look around for a new window manager and it was decided that one should aim for one written in C like the rest of the desktop libraries to lessen the chance of future maintenance prolems. To answer this call Havoc Pennington stepped up with Metacity and it was quickly adopted by a lot of GNOME developers and users and subsequently chosen as the standard.

Metacity was philosophically very different from Sawfish and Havoc
was very strict about what he let into Metacity, due to an idea that requests for config options was usually a result of broken behaviour in the window manager and thus feeling the behaviour should be fixed instead of a config option added to work around the problem.
This was in line with the policy that do govern GNOME as mentioned above, but in the case of Metacity this was applied in a much sterner/hardcore fashion that for most other modules.
But due to Havoc’s high profile in the community and beyond it I think the policy he kept for metacity colored how people outside the project perceivedthe project as a whole which is the main reason I see for this hard killed perception to live on.

Anyway, back to Linus and his irritation with Metacity. I can’t not say if his patches will go in or not, its not my call. But I did at least add them properly to bugzilla for Linus to ensure they get reviewed and commented on at least.

Rhythmbox

There are lot of nice developments happening these days. After having been using Banshee for a while I have to say that Rhythmbox have won me back. The work that has been put into polishing RB over the last months have been incredible. There are so many little details I just love now with the current GUI, like the beautifuly fading in/out of album covers. I am also happy to see that all my emusic bought songs gets album cover art now in rb, something I never got before with any other player. The Play queue in sidebar option is also very nice, and the source list has been polished up and just looks sweet atm. Thanks!
Also happy that the Rhythmbox team is now working on relicensing RB to the same licensing setup used for Totem enabling distro’s to both ship RB and also ship support for non-free formats like Windows Media and MPEG.

Totem

Totem has also gotten a lot of love recently, especially the Mozilla/Firefox/Epiphany etc. plugin. It now registers itself with four plugins in order to handle as many as possible of those weird detection scripts used out there, with one plugin pretending to be Windows Media player, one pretending to be Real Player, one pretending to be Quicktime player and finally one being just Totem :). Also been a lot of work on the playlist handling fixing a bug where in some cases Totem handed GStreamer a playlist instead of the actual media uri. A big thanks to Bastien and Christian Perch for this work. We did find a few new bugs due to it in some GStreamer plugins, but hopefully we get on top of those quickly enough.

Fluendo Windows Media plugins

The Fluendo windows Media plugins continues to see a lot of work and polish. One thing we are working on getting working perfectly currently is allowing you to transcode only one of the streams in a file. For instance the pipeline below would convert the WMA audio into MP3 while keeping the WMV video as it is. The advantage of being able to do this is that the video quality doesn’t get further degraded as video isn’t decoded and encoded again, its just demux and remuxed back in with the transcoded audio.

gst-launch filesrc location=leavestech_gp_0516_700.wmv ! fluasfdemux name=demux .stream_2 ! queue max-size-time=0 max-size-buffers=0 ! progressreport name=v ! fluasfmux name=mux ! filesink location=leavestech_as_mp3.wmv demux.stream_1 ! queue max-size-time=0 max-size-buffers=0 ! fluwmadec ! audioconvert ! progressreport name=audio ! lame ! mux. -v


Vacation time

Heading up to Norway on Sunday for a two week vacation. It is actually the longest non-stop vacation I ever had (not counting my between jobs trip around the world). Looking forward to relaxing and spending time with my family. Only thing that frustrates me before leaving is that I managed to forget to go to the Spanish tax office today to pick up my certificate showing I am a Spanish resident and tax payer now. Well I guess at this point two more weeks doesn’t matter that much anyway.

So I got my TDT box set up yesterday and taken a step into the world of terrestrial digital TV. After struggling a bit with the cabling (the TDT box primary output is Euro SCART, but all the stuff I wanted to connect to I am using S-VHS cabling for.) Discovered that my hi-fi amplifier could do RCA to S-VHS conversion in the end and luckily there is also a RCA video ouput and a coaxial SP/DIF output on the box.

Anyway this move took me from 20 channels where the image where unwatchable on 15 of them, to 30 channels all with good image and sound quality. I am a bit suprised that TDT doesn’t do surround sound though, or maybe its just my cheap ass TDT box not supporting it. On the other side when I went to get cables yesterday I did look at the other TDT boxes offered and was suprised that none of them seemed to offer better connectivity than my own box. I mean when you compete in what I would assume is a rather standarized market I would think one way to try to beat the competition is offering better connectivity options than your competitors. Yet none of the boxes had for instance optical sp/diff or s-vhs output for example. They seemed all to only offer the SCART, RCA, coaxial SPDIF and coxial audio left/right output. Of course even if I know have 30 channels that doesn’t mean I got 30 viewable channels, most of them offer little of interest. At least I have an antenna cable now capable of TDT which means I can be a tester when we get to implementing this stuff in Elisa.

Instanbul:
Screenshots are so last year it seems, and everyone is now moving over to screencasts. Good news is that Zaheer has been working hard on making Istanbul the best screencast recording tool out there. With his latest changes Istanbul is capable of recording OpenGL based applications which in these days of XGL, AIGXL, Elisa, lowfat and so on being able to record OpenGL stuff is essential. So check out
Zaheer’s latest blog post for details.

Also be aware that the latest versions of Cortado our Ogg Theora/Ogg Vorbis playing Java applet has a working seekbar now. If you check out the Elisa screencast you see that a seeker bar appears if you let the mouse pointer rest over the video image. With this you can host screencasts on your webpage and even allow people to seek in the online movies.

I guess I also should use the chance to pimp LugRadio live this year (and myself doing a talk there).

So thanks to Crispin
and the people commenting on his blog I at least figured out how
one creates new keyboard profiles for X11.

Step 1: Get the numerical code for the key using the ‘xev’ tool shipping with X

Step 2: Figure out the X11 code by looking up those numbers in /usr/share/X11/xkb/keycodes/xfree86

Step 3: Add a section to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/inet with those codes linking them to relevant XFree86 codes. (make a backup copy first) For my laptop that ended up with:

// Laptop/notebook Dell Inspiron 8xxx
partial alphanumeric_keys
xkb_symbols "inspiron" {
    key <I22>   {       [ XF86AudioPlay, XF86AudioPause ] };
    key <I10>   {       [ XF86AudioPrev         ]       };
    key <I19>   {       [ XF86AudioNext         ]       };
    key <I24>   {       [ XF86AudioStop         ]       };
    key <I30>   {       [ XF86AudioRaiseVolume  ]       };
    key <I2E>   {       [ XF86AudioLowerVolume  ]       };
    key <I20>   {       [ XF86AudioMute         ]       };
};

Step 4: Then make a unified patch by doing:

diff -u inet inet.backup > inet.patch

Step 5: And finally submit
a bug into the freedesktop bugzilla

First entry after moving my blog

librsvg and Cairo

The Cairo backend for librsvg is quickly taking shape now that Dom, Caled and Carl and collaborating on it. Even though Cairo is quite unoptimized yet we are seeing some great effects compared to the libart backend. The gearflower.svg file for instance renders 6 times faster with librsvg-cairo than it does with librsvg-libart. As Cairo gets optimized the difference will increase even further.
Cool stuff!

GStreamer 0.9

Good progress being made on all fronts with GStreamer 0.9 (maybe apart from making a new release from CVS :). With Ronald’s patch from bugzilla I was able to play Ogg, Avi and a Real file in Totem today. Only the Ogg near perfect, but still its nice to see things coming together. The new CVS Totem looks nice, great work from Bastien and Ronald.

SCO of the literary world?

I quite some time ago blogged about my impression of the DaVinci code (and my general lack of being impressed by it).
Anyway there was/is a copyright case filed against Dan Brown from a disgruntled author who felt Dan Brown had taken many plot ideas from him and used them in the DaVinci code.
This author even have a blog set up to cover the case. The judge recently came out with a clear non-infringement verdict in the case and it is an interesting read for those of us following the SCO case as it gives one example on how todays judges view copyright (and sorry SCO, general ideas are still not copyrightable).

Even though most book authors seems to think of themselves as the embodiment of creativity and new ideas, the reality is that everything they do someone else have written before them. Sucessful writing is not really about unique plot elements, its about craftmanship, the skill of enganging the reader in whatever story you are telling. A great and relativly fresh plot can not cover over bad writing, but good writing have a good chance of covering over a weak plot. (Although some unappy readers like myself, with the DaVinci code, feel a bit cheated when we get treated to a weak and illogical plot).

I guess next on Perdue’s lawsuit list would be Jacqueline Carey as her Kushiel triology also touch the topic of a feminine divinity and is loosely based on religious history with some added spice.

SMIL the next chapter

So after a lot of work Ambulant
worked on my machine. Sent Jack and co. my configure and Makefile fixes so hopefully they will merge them.

Next step is to have Tim investigate utilizing libambulant in GStreamer/Totem. Luckily Jack from the Ambulant team seems very interested in this too, so hopefully by working together we will be able to get somewhere.

As Dom mentioned in his blog, Cairo support in librsvg is starting to take shape now with Carl Worth hacking on it like crazy. Will also see if I can get the Ambulant guys interested in using librsvg to try get SVG support into Ambulant. Dom fears I will create a lot of work for him and Caled doing that, while I always say that there is nothing to fear except fear itself.

Food on sticks

So with Tim and Ronald here we went out to eat at a Basque tapas place last night. They have a fun setup where you go around taking and eating the tapas you want. In each tapas there is a toothpick and in the end you pay based on how many toothpicks you have collected. A highly trust based
concept, but it seems to work.