Ronald S. Bultje

It’s interesting how people try to hide the fact that they’re geeks and blatantly fail because their peer is just as bad as them. Thomas already touched upon that in his latest entry, so let’s take one of my own examples.

So I live in New York City and hang out with people here. I promised, one day, to send pictures of one night out to two girls that had been coming with me. Those pictures are located on the tweakers.net picture gallery. For those who don’t know, tweakers.net is a dutch slashdot-like computer-oriented website (news, forum, …). So I sent them a link to this picture gallery. The day after, one of those girls pointed out to me that her ex-boyfriend, a “complete geek and ass-hole” (what a surprise for an ex 😉 ), used to be hanging out on this website for full days and she was worried that I was one of those cracks as well.

Of course, I told her I was not. … That wasn’t even a complete lie, realistically. I barely touch computers here, I barely have time for that…

(Makes me wonder: who’s this ex-boyfriend of hers? :-). I might even know him. Scary shit.)

Pending:
Today, I found that I still have pending patches that are as bad as four months old. I suck. I’ll be back home in four weeks from now and promise to clean up my inbox after that. My apologies to anyone who’s sent me patches and didn’t see them applied yet; they’re in my inbox (I always mark patches as important and those occur at the bottom of my inbox, marked in red). They just take a while. Same goes for assigned bug reports or pending actions. Sorry guys. I’m doig what I can, but my time is limited right now.

Just arrived in Ottawa with Dave for DDC. Will try to show up at the welcome party at 8:00 PM tonight, hope it’ll be interesting.

I’ve been wanting to post this for several weeks now, but advogato kept being down!

Freedom:
So lately, I hear this free software activist talking about some software that I work on. He hates the software. That’s ok. Why? Because he hates me and my opinions. I won’t go into the opinions, since this is not the right place for a political discussion (it’s a typical liberal [me] vs. socialist [he] case), but would just like to mention that this is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life. Free software is only a small piece in the freedom puzzle, which is the ultimate fight that we’re continuously struggling with. Freedom of speach, freedom of ideas and the consequent disagreements are all part of that. A society that allows for all this, requires respect between individuals in order to be liveable. I disagree with you, but I don’t hate you. Why do you hate me for my ideas? Is that freedom?

And in the mean time…:
… I was enjoying fireworks in Manhattan yesterday, as part of the 4th-of-July celebration. Beautiful!

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!

d-d-l signal/noise ratio:
Michael, there is nothing wrong with closing d-d-l. d-d-l is used as a one-for-all list because it has that image: it is an open list, everyone posts to it and on random subjects. I can see that in the archives! Tadah, a list for all my random mess has been born. The solution is simple: close it, and post good guidelines for new subscribers.

I’m not subscribed to several interesting lists because of that, and would hate to add d-d-l to that list-of-lists for this reason.

A GNOME developer that wants to join GNOME development and related discussions should have the motivation to do the basic effort of subscribing. If he doesn’t, then he’s doomed to not be a good GNOME developer.

On the other side, I like it when Jeff pulls on his dictatorship hat and screams end-of-thread. I’ll miss that. Ohwell, I’ll have to cope with that.

Surround sound support in GStreamer:
Some genious mind provided me with a surround sound system for my laptop. I just got it working, and my housemates will hate me for quite some time now. For some unknown reason, I know have six speakers in my three-by-two meter room, and they make enough noise to keep the whole house with me. Lovely!

Interestingly, we also pretty much figured out how we want this to be done in GStreamer. My previous proposal was not ideal enough, so we adapted it slightly. It now is somewhat more extensible than the previous proposal.

Basically, for a GstCaps/GstStructure with X channels, the structure will have an extra property “channel_positions” (if absent on channels <= 2, it’s simply mono or stereo), which is a GValueArray filled with an enum of type GstChannelPosition. This will proove to be a truely adventurous task, because we haven’t used named enums before. Particularly, serialization/deserialization (going to enum from string and back, for things like GConf or gst-launch commandline and so on) will proove to be interesting. Secondly, we will need type-specific (extendible) fixation functions (to make sure that it fixates to something sane (which somewhat resembles “surround”, rather than “all channels topleft”.

The enum will be similar to Microsoft’s enumeration of channel positions, as specified here.

Time to proove myself worthy to this genious mind! I’d better have some interesting 5:1 DVDs with me for the next few weeks! :).

The instructions are: Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Due to there being 64 (4^3) possible codons, but only 20 different amino acids, the genetic code is degenerate: each amino acid is specified on average by about three different codons.

It’s 10 PM, and I’m at the university. What a life…

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So, GStreamer plays back .mp4a/.mp4v files now in CVS. Beat that, Fluendo gang! :).

And now that we’ve got that figured out, it’s time to start working on multi-channel sound support. I recently wrapped dtsdec in GStreamer, and that makes up to a total of three codecs now (AC-3, DTS, MPEG-2/4 AAC) that support it. So far, we always downsampled to stereo or failed (in the case of faad; bad!).

So, what’s needed:

• a GstCaps property for channel positions
• respective decoder plugins spitting these out
• alsasink checking for those
• audioconvert for channel conversions

So I’m basically doing the first and second now. We’ll start going for a simple approach, similar to what Xine, liba52 and dtsdec do. They all use enumerations for different output modes (5_1, 4_0, stereo, mono). We will use a string that represents the number of channels in each part of your audio room (front, side, rear, lfe). The string basically consists of number-letter combinations, so 5:1 (3 front, 2 rear, LFE) sound will be “3f2rlfe” (f being front channels, s side channels, r rear channels and lfe indicates the subwoofer channel). The layout of samples in buffers is then interleaved, left-to-right, front-to-back, then lfe, so in 3f2rlfe, it would be left-front, center, right-front, left-rear, right-rear, lfe and then the next left-front sample. This isn’t covering all corner cases of odd audio setups (there might be people with only three boxes on their left side), but will do for the general case.

The next step is to implement this in a52dec (AC-3 audio decoder plugin), dtsdec (DTS audio decoder plugin) and faad (MPEG-2/4 AAC audio decoder plugin), which is what I’m currently working on. Alsasink/audioconvert will be done at a later step (somewhere next week or so) and then all this should work.

So, anyone wanna buy me a 5:1 audio setup for my laptop for testing purposes? ;).

Miguel, you’re not installing 160 MB GStreamer (source! That’s only a few MB binary – nice trick 😉 ) for playing MP3s. Or did you think Microsoft DirectShow only plays WMA audio? :).

GStreamer
How cool will 0.8.0 be! :). Honestly, it’ll rock. I’ve been testing Totem over and over again for the past few weeks. I can playback a large amount of movies, pretty much anything on my harddisk. I *am* still having issues, but for all, the problem is known, so it should be fixable easily:

• One MPEG-4 video/audio Quicktime file doesn’t decode correctly. That’s because we don’t initialize the extradata member in AVCodecContext using the ‘esds’ atom contents in the Quicktime file. Same for MPEG-4 AAC audio, but there, it’s not required.
• The Quicktime demuxer currently has some issues with raw PCM or MACE audio. the problem lies in the demuxer, not a decoder or setup or anything. Will probably be a minor quick fix.
• Some MPEGs with highly unsynchronized elemtary streams will ‘lock’ our internal clocking (video far ahead of audio, but no fresh audio data). The correct fix is probably to make the amount of buffered data somewhat larger for output queue elements, say from 1 second to 5 seconds (those are limits).

Apart from that, I can playback most MPEG files, all other Quicktime files and with no single problem all AVI, ASF and MKV files. Please add bugzilla entries (GNOME bugzilla, product ‘GStreamer’) for every single “common media file” (so don’t bother adding WMV9 movies 😉 ) that doesn’t playback using Totem-GStreamer using current CVS of both. Maybe I’ll push some more and try to get GStreamer 0.8.1 out of the door for GNOME-2.6.0, with each of those fixed. That would rock! I didn’t test Rhythmbox as extensively, but I know that I can playback MPEG-4 AAC, Ogg/Vorbis, MP3 with no problems. That’s about 100% fo my collection. I don’t use WMA (which should work), WAV (blah) or FLAC… I have some test files for each, though. I need more video test files.

GNOME
I’m – as of today – a happy member of the GNOME foundation! Yay! GNOME, luv ya!

U.S.A.
Did I mention how much I love the U.S.A., or more specifically Manhattan, so far? It’s so clean, it’s so controlled, it’s so… Special! I simply love this place. Cornell University is a wonderful place to be at, too. Awesome!