Ronald S. Bultje

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. ;-).

Totem Mozilla Embedding
Bastien already said that we had basic javascript functionality people working in the Totem-Mozilla plugin. Today, I finished the second part of the job: a two-way communication protocol. Should ideally use DBUS for that, but we’re using something of ourselves right now.

The result of that is that the plugin and the child application (which is spawned on its own for security reasons) interact using some basic IPC command-set. This, in combination with the javascript-functionality, means that I can click images on a HTML page and the player will react as it should. The javascript-calls are compatible with Quicktime Player. Woohoo, finally a kick-ass mozilla media player. :-). Get your daily dose of Totem-CVS today!

MP4 authoring
After Jon’s release of pyMusique, I felt the strong need to get my hands on a working MPEG-4 ISO muxer (for GStreamer). Reasons are simple:

• Writing tags to music downloaded from iTMS (yes, they’re untagged!).
• Capture MPEG-4 video/audio in a MPEG-4 container using Cupid.
• Transcoding my Ogg/Vorbis files to MPEG-4 so I can transfer them to my iPod.

And so I did. GStreamer can now write full-spec MPEG-4 files. Screenshot. Tested with all of the above use cases. (3) can be done using gst-launch, tags are conserved. (2) just works. Jon is adding support for (1) right now. Get your daily dose of GStreamer CVS right now!

Release day
It’s kinda evil, but hey, why not? All poor packagers are busy already, so let’s give them some more work. I’ve released Cupid 0.0.2, which is a GStreamer/GNOME video-capture and -display tool, and GStreamer-FFmpeg 0.8.4, which is a set of GStreamer plugins based on the popular and high-quality ffmpeg codecs.

Other people release, too
Also, one of our new GStreamer supporters, Jon Lech Johansen, released pyMusique today, which is a Gtk-application that lets you buy music from the iTunes Music Store from your GNOME desktop. I’m already a happy user of this piece of software. Great work, Jon!

GNOME-nl release party
After the release of GNOME 2.10 and the congratulations from our KDE-nl colleagues, it was time to celebrate the release locally. A total of 10 people had a great evening in the Stairway to Heaven in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Of course made the obligatory Tux-with-beer picture, but most importantly, we all celebrated the continued livelihood of our beloved GNOME. Here‘s another picture showing (clock-wise) Kris (with blue hair!), Wouter, Jeroen, Hette, Tino, Vincent and Reinout. Not shown but definately there were Laurens, Marcel and Tim. Great release-party, let’s hope we can soon do this again!

European software patents
I just heard multiple such rumours… After the EP (EU parliament) proposed to restart the directive decision-makery, after MPs (national parliaments) of many countries opposed the directive, after many citizens openly opposed the directive, after Denmark announced they would oppose the A-item, at least for the meeting this morning, after all our tries …

… the EC (EU council) just passed the patent directive. Long live democracy. :-(.

GNOME 2.10 release party
At the day of the release (Wednesday, March 9th), GNOME-nl will be organizing one of the GNOME release parties to celebrate the release of our all-beloved GNOME 2.10. See this page for a complete list. Our party will be held in the Stairway to Heaven, which is a popular cafe close to the train station of Utrecht. All interested people are invited to come and join us from 20.00 on.

All dutch GNOME developers, translaters, contributors and enthusiasts are hereby invited to come and join us in this celebration. Don’t bring your laptop, however, it’s not a LAN/install party. See you wednesday!

iTunes Music Store #2
So, apparently, if you use iTMS on your Linux/GNOME machine, you can buy songs and play them back. Against all expectations, these songs are:

• not tagged (shame on you, Apple!)
• not encrypted (woohoo! love ya)

Hey, it’s only $0.99/song, what are we waiting for? :-). Longe live Apple!

iTunes Music Store
Today (that’s a lie; it was yesterday), the tooth fairy knocked on my door again. I said “heya tooth fairy, what’ve you been up to lately?” and the tooth fairy just stood there, smiling, happy, glimming even. Silent. Then, I knew something was gonna happen. I’d been here before.

She said: “Ronald, I’ve been doing something different lately. Do you want me to take you to this new world and show you the code that will rule your hard disk tomorrow?” and I said “sure, why not” and off we were.

And there we went off, to a computer, she showed me a dark terminal with a GNOME mountains background through the transparent background (yes, that’s slow). And she typed, magically, but it worked as if it was a P-4 2 GHz: “search Korn“, and output appeared. Free preview (~15sec), played back through GStreamer, $0.99 for the full song. This is not just a price. Those knowledgeable know what this means.

Apple iTunes Music Store accessible on your Linux box (with a shiny GNOME UI, of course). Coming soon.