Ronald S. Bultje

Democracy can win
For the second time in a matter of days, the Dutch government had to withdraw a rather controversial decision. Only days ago, an agreement with software giant Microsoft for delivering software to more than 250,000 computers over a period of 3-5 years was cancelled after companies and organizations raised concern because European rules for required public biddings had been bypassed.

Today, the Netherlands had to withdraw an item from the EU council agenda which would approve software patents in Europe, thereby bypassing the governments wishes in Netherlands, Germany and Poland (who disapprove, but whose EU representatives were forced to approve nevertheless), and also bypassing the European parliament. Read the full story.

It seems like we’re not screwed just yet. EP will have to vote again over this issue during the next term, and I sincerely hope that the representatives will this time actually represent their countries’ real opinion. Death to software patents!

No-Bug-Week for GStreamer
In the past few days, we solved an incredible amount of bugs. Most are things that reproduce with only a few movies, or only for some installations. I think this implies that we *are* actually getting better. Finally. Bugzilla implies that we now have 163 bugs left. This excludes enhancements, gst-rec, gst-editor and gst-player. With those last modules included, we’re now at 175. With enhancements included, we’re at 217. Not bad, knowing that we were far above 300 only 2-3 weeks ago.

FFMpeg update
I recently updated the ffmpeg snapshot in our gst-ffmpeg module. I’ve now (at some point) done successful test builds (including optimizations) on x86, PPC and Sparc using Linux, Solaris or freeBSD. RPMs (as usual) of current CVS for Fedora Core 3 are available on this repository. Some nice new features include the support of h264, which gives us a new feature that even mplayer doesn’t support yet.
Now if only I could get those friggin’ gaming formats to work. :).

New York revisited
From my motivation letter: “Roughly one year ago, I stepped into the professor’s office in Utrecht, the Netherlands. “I’d like to give it a try”, was my short answer, and six months later I left off for New York City, leaving student life, a job as software engineer and my friends behind. Now, six months later, I’ve just finished my six-month visit at the Cornell University pharmacology research labs. It has changed my thinking. [..] The facilities at Cornell were amazing, the research was stunning, the people were very motivating and the city was a paradise for me. I want to continue living that life for many more years.”

From today: “I submitted the email you sent to the Admissions Committee and they review your application. They have decided to invite you to attend the Weill Cornell Graduate School Recruitment Weekend.”

I’m not there yet, but this feels like a dream already. I’ll go back to Manhattan, I’ll relive my dream-come-true. Thanks to all. Wow.

Documentation
Documentation are the paria of the free software movement. The thing is, you know you need them, but you don’t want to write them since it takes time. In the end, you spend 10x as much time explaining various things to people. And then you decide to write docs anyway. And then people rewrite stuff and it all falls apart.

Today, I uploaded a first version of a largely rewritten GStreamer Application Development Manual. Many parts need lots of work, but some parts are already useful (e.g. part2, the first chapters of part3 and the first two sections of part4). Feel the love.

One less reason why GStreamer sucks!
Uh uh, you can’t say it anymore. Think of something better, dude! As of know, my local tree supports MMS, thanks to the wonderful work of Maciej. It’ll soon be checked into CVS, and it’ll be available in the next GStreamer-plugins release. Which is wonderful, because it means we have a whole bunch of features that just are dying to be released and tested, such as:

• another many alsa fixes and speedups
• svcd/vcd/dvd support (for totem)
• surround sound support
• mms support

It’s kinda nice to see all our core devs (Dave, Benjamin, Wim) be busy with their 0.9 ideas while I have all CVS for myself alone to break and fix. Both Benjamin and Wim have a 0.9 branch (Wim in FDO CVS, Benjamin on Arch in his FDO homedir), I should soon check both out and grab the good bits.

Oh, let’s not forget the necessary screenshot from this mms webstream.

KDE#2
Hm indeed! Happy to see the KDE people be happy with the app that I wrote, I hope to see parts back in other – more userfriendly – players such as kmplayer or kaffeine. In the end, let’s hope KDE gets players with similar feature sets as Totem (ideally with GStreamer as a backend actively supported everywhere in the desktop environment).

KDE#3
I promise, I’m still a GNOME maintainer. ;).

Fabrice, from KDE.nl fame, came up with the great idea to organize a gettogether with several people interested in cross-desktop collaboration (think KDE, GNOME, other desktop environments). He wanted to specifically target multimedia, since that’s pretty much of a hot topic lately in both KDE and GNOME. We hope to organize it somewhere early in 2005 either in the Netherlands or just over the border in Germany. All interested people (you’re not required to be a devillish media-hacker, don’t worry! Interest is good enough!) are hereby invited. We hope that some German, Belgian and Dutch people will show up. I’ll try to be there, and let’s hope Scott and Mark (from KDE-mm) will be there too.

Related, someone posted pictures from the Novell conference, where we had a nice gettogether and got social with the KDE-nl people. Here, you see me pillowfighting with one of ’em. ;). He survived, I swear.

GNOME-nl activities
Today, we had our first official GNOME-nl bum. Four of us, being Erik, Vincent, Reinout and me left early in the morning to the east for a congress organized by Novell resellers. Lotsa businessmen, managers and other dangerous species in ties. Not only us, but also the folks of KDE-nl, Nedlinux and the dutch Linux User Group were there, along with a whole bunch of resellers, service companies and such. Both us and KDE-nl had been announced as there to “promote the image of Linux on the desktop”. We had a special corner in the halls and were right in the picture. Not bad!

Honestly, it was great to do. All four of us were rather new at this so we weren’t quite sure how to get started, but we managed to grab attention with our shiny laptops with modern Linux-running laptops with the best of breed of applications (mostly stock GNOME-2.8), available for general trying pleasure by the audience and for answers to any questions. Some people have already used it – and their quesitons are thougher than the real new ones, who really just barely dare to touch the stuff (“will it explode?” – “Yes :)”). Good to do for a change. Let’s not forget, this is our intended target audience.

Some of the other resellers were rather helpful towards us – one even mentioned interest in sponsoring small bits and pieces in our future efforts already. That’s great, because it’s not like we care for the EUR 25 that we spent on posters and flyers, but you don’t want to do that each time. Getting refunds for travel expenses would be even better, buyt let’s not chear too early just yet.

Especially interesting were the encounters with the KDE-nl members. We ended up doing some sort of a pillow-fight, for fun of course, and (now on to the serious part) we had an incredible amount of success in trying to set up some shared efforts. Obviously, setting up is not the same as doing it, but clearly the intention to work together on certain things (like organizing local hacker meetings and such) is definately there – and face it, we’re too small to do such things alone. Special thanks to Fabrice from KDE-nl for being a great help here. Well done, dude! The sponsorships mentioned above would definately help here. Let’s hope we can get this going in a few months. I’d love to have a small hacker meeting with some Dutch (and neighbours) KDE-/GNOME-hackers.

I’ll see if I can post some pictures tonight. I’ve been up from 6:30AM this morning until now (midnight) and I’ve had a headache for quite a few hours now. Enough. :).

Something different
The traitor, the trojan horse – or just a great gift? Given the recent invasion of the KDE camp by GStreamer, I decided to enlighten KDE and write a simple version of a Totem-like video player with a GStreamer backend. I present you: Kiss (screenshot).

For hardcore testers
Lately, I’ve been in the lucky position to have several people test CVS of GStreamer and Totem for me regularly and give me feedback on bugs. Because of them, I’ve been able to make Totem’s GStreamer backend improve so much lately. We’re far from finished, but we’re gradually moving on from fixing downright crashers to fixing timing issues and adding user-requested features.

Now, you can help! In this blog, you’ll find this RPM repo which regularly provides new RPMs of the current CVS of GStreamer and Totem for Fedora Core 3. Use at your own risk, and don’t forget to report bugs! Many thanks to Felix for doing this.

For those that want to report bugs, here’s a list of known ones (from the top of my head):

• I’ve recently noticed that our AC-3 decoder doesn’t handle incoming timestamps correctly. The consequence is that if you have an AVI with AC-3 sound, then it will play back correctly, but if you seek to halfway the movie, the time slider will just continue ticking as if no seek happened (even though it did). A/V sync might also be slightly affected by this (still researching that). A quick but correct fix is being worked on.
• You cannot seek (yet) on MPEG-1/-2 video-only (.m1v, .m2v), FLC video (.flc/.flx), raw AC-3. raw MPEG-2/-4 AAC (.aac) and raw DTS streams. You will also not be able to get position information from those formats, or the information will be highly incorrect. Please note that this has nothing to do with DTS, AC-3 or MPEG embedded in Quicktime/MP4, AVI or MPEG streams.
• mms://, rtp:// (input protocols), WMV9 (video codec), WMA3 and QDM2 (audio codecs) and most Real-formats are not yet supported.

Real…
Now that I’m at this topic anyway, can I please publically request Real to either back down from the free software community or make it possible for us to communicate with their Real-format modules? I’ve seen enough split tongues in my life already. Real is an extremely bad player in the free software community. It solely abuses the community to add features to their so-called open Helix project (with forced permission to steal code) to consequently really steal this code and embed it in the actually somewhat useful but closed-source and highly-IP-protected Real player. Open up so we can embed Real content in GStreamer. Legally. Thank you.

Edit: if any of the Real people reads this, also re-read this message on desktop integration. To add up to that, also note that we’ve now been chosen as default for KDE(-4.0), too.

Pictures that make you cry
Garrett, thanks for this piece of beauty. It makes me fall in love. Again. Here‘s my version of the picture, a few streets more to the west though.

Ah, Manhattan…

Using GStreamer for channel upmixing
herzi, the short answer is “gst-launch-0.8 filesrc location=file.ogg ! oggdemux ! vorbisdec ! audioconvert ! audioscale ! audio/x-raw-int,channels=6 ! alsasink” if your soundcard supports 5.1 playback. It assumes that your ‘default’ device in alsa (/etc/asound.conf) is set to hw:0 or plughw:0, but not dmix! Dmix only handles 2 channels so it’ll fail gracefully (or maybe even not). If you want more media types, then simply use “gst-launch-0.8 filesrc location=$file ! decodebin ! audioconvert ! audioscale ! audio/x-raw-int,channels=6 ! alsasink”.

I’m planning to hook up the ‘audio channel configuration’ widget in Totem into the GStreamer backend too during one of the next few days. That should automate this behaviour for most people. Maybe Rhythmbox should get such a widget too (and maybe we should therefore move it somewhere to the preferences at some point?).