Today Ohloh finished importing the Launchpad source code and produced the first source code analysis report. There seems to be something fishy about the reported line counts (e.g. -3,291 lines of SQL), but the commit counts and contributor list look about right. If you’re interested in what sort of effort goes into producing an application like Launchpad, then it is worth a look.
In my last post, I said I had trouble getting Rygel’s tracker backend to function and assumed that it was expecting an older version of the API. It turns out I was incorrect and the problem was due in part to Ubuntu specific changes to the Tracker package and the unusual way Rygel was trying to talk to Tracker.
The Tracker packages in Ubuntu remove the D-Bus service activation file for the “org.freedesktop.Tracker” bus name so that if the user has not chosen to run the service (or has killed it), it won’t be automatically activated. Unfortunately, instead of just calling a Tracker D-Bus method, Rygel was trying to manually activate Tracker via a StartServiceByName() call. This would fail even if Tracker was running, hence my assumption that it was a tracker API version problem.
This problem will be fixed in the next Rygel release: it will call a method on Tracker directly to see if it is available. With that problem out of the way, I was able to try out the backend. It was providing a lot more metadata to the PS3 so more files were playable, which was good. Browsing folders was also much quicker than the folder back end. There were a few problems though:
When the folder back end fixes the metadata and speed issues, I’d be inclined to use it over the tracker back end.
Video Transcoding
Getting video transcoding working turned out to require a newer GStreamer (0.10.23), the “unstripped” ffmpeg libraries and the “bad” GStreamer plugins package from multiverse. With those installed, things worked pretty well. With these dependencies encoded in the packaging, it’d be pretty painless to get it set up. Certainly much easier than setting things up in MediaTomb’s configuration file.
I promised Zeeshan that I’d have a look at his Rygel UPnP Media Server a few months back, and finally got around to doing so. For anyone else who wants to give it a shot, I’ve put together some Ubuntu packages for Jaunty and Karmic in a PPA here:
Most of the packages there are just rebuilds or version updates of existing packages, but the Rygel ones were done from scratch. It is the first Debian package I’ve put together from scratch and it wasn’t as difficult as I thought it might be. The tips from the “Teach me packaging” workshop at the Canonical All Hands meeting last month were quite helpful.
After installing the package, you can configure it by running the “rygel-preferences” program. The first notebook page lets you configure the transcoding support, and the second page lets you configure the various media source plugins.
I wasn’t able to get the Tracker plugin working on my system, which I think is due to Rygel expecting the older Tracker D-Bus API. I was able to get the folder plugin working pretty easily though.
Once things were configured, I ran Rygel itself and an extra icon showed up on my PlayStation 3. Getting folder listings was quite slow, but apparently this is limited to the folder back end and is currently being worked on. It’s a shame I wasn’t able to test the more mature Tracker back end.
With LPCM transcoding enabled, I was able to successfully play a Vorbis file on the PS3. With transcoding disabled, I wasn’t able to play any music — even files in formats the PS3 could handle natively. This was apparently due to the folder backend not providing the necessary metadata. I didn’t have any luck with MPEG2 transcoding for video.
It looks like Rygel has promise, but is not yet at a stage where it could replace something like MediaTomb. The external D-Bus media source support looks particularly interesting. I look forward to trying out version 0.4 when it is released.
Last week, we released the source code to django-openid-auth. This is a small library that can add OpenID based authentication to Django applications. It has been used for a number of internal Canonical projects, including the sprint scheduler Scott wrote for the last Ubuntu Developer Summit, so it is possible you’ve already used the code.
Rather than trying to cover all possible use cases of OpenID, it focuses on providing OpenID Relying Party support to applications using Django’s django.contrib.auth authentication system. As such, it is usually enough to edit just two files in an existing application to enable OpenID login.
The library has a number of useful features:
While the code can be used for generic OpenID login, we’ve mostly been using it for single sign on. The hope is that it will help members of the Ubuntu and Launchpad communities reuse our authentication system in a secure fashion.
The source code can be downloaded using the following Bazaar command:
bzr branch lp:django-openid-auth
Documentation on how to integrate the library is available in the README.txt file. The library includes some code written by Simon Willison for django-openid, and uses the same licensing terms (2 clause BSD) as that project.
One of the nice features of the PlayStation 3 is the UPNP/DLNA media renderer. Unfortunately, the set of codecs is pretty limited, which is a problem since most of my music is encoded as Vorbis. MediaTomb was suggested to me as a server that could transcode the files to a format the PS3 could understand.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have much luck with the version included with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid), and after a bit of investigation it seems that there isn’t a released version of MediaTomb that can send PCM audio to the PS3. So I put together a package of a subversion snapshot in my PPA which should work on Intrepid.
With the newer package, it was pretty easy to get things working:
Things aren’t perfect though. As MediaTomb is simply piping the transcoded audio to the PS3, it doesn’t implement seeking on such files, and it seems that the PS3 won’t even let you pause a stream that doesn’t allow seeking. With a less generalised transcoding backend, it seems like it should be trivial to support seeking in an uncompressed PCM stream though, since the byte offsets can be trivially mapped to sample numbers.
The other problem I found was that none of the recent music I’d ripped showed up. It seems that they’d been ripped with the .oga file extension rather than .ogg. This change appears to have been made in bug 543306, but the reasoning seems suspect: the guidelines from Xiph indicate that the files generated by this encoding profile should continue to use the .ogg file extension.
I tried adding some extra mappings to the MediaTomb configuration file to recognise the files without success, but eventually decided to just rename them and fix the encoding profile locally.
A Perfect Media Server
While MediaTomb mostly works for me, it doesn’t do everything I’d like. A few of the things I’d like out of a media server include:
Perhaps Zeeshan‘s media server will be worth trying out at some point.