The GNOME Media Player:
So, in order to slay xine and thereby bring the day closer that we will conquer the world, I decided to start hacking on libgstplay. The result is available in bug number #143030 and can hopefully be backported in one way or another to the 0.8.x GStreamer series. The idea is to simplify it a lot and thereby increase the involvement of core hackers such as ds or company in fixing libgstplay-related issues and thereby improving playback capabilities of GStreamer.

The result is quite nice. Within a day, we saw a UI based on it that can playback music much like projects like Muine or Rhythmbox. Not that it looks as pretty, but that’s not the point of a testing application anyway. I hope this work will make libgstplay work much more reliably than it used to. There’s some minor other points involved, but I have some interesting ideas on how to progress once this is done.

The final goal should be clear: Totem – based on a GStreamer backend – should make it into GNOME 2.8.0! A desktop without an ass-kicking media player is just not the same.

GNOME Volume Control:
In the mean time, ow3n came over to me on IRC and told me that the ALSA version of GNOME Volume Control really looked horrible (no kidding!) and offered to help in fixing it (yay!).

As earlier proposed by Seth, we should hide all those switches in the default UI. Does anybody know what they mean? Even the ALSA people don’t! So we’ll just omit those from the default UI and maybe even hide some obscure volume controls (my laptop doesn’t have a phone, you moron! And not two either!) given that they make little sense.

This will also make it into GNOME 2.8.0.

What’s Life All About…
Now, one thing that I’ve particularly noticed here in New York is that all nice girls are already taken. Not much difference from the Netherlands, in hindsight.

Well, little choice but to go out with the already-taken-ones, then!