Ronald S. Bultje

I’ve moved to New York City this week; I’m now living on Cornell medschool campus. Next week, university introduction starts, including a Mets – Philies game and a cafe Wha? visit. And lots of academically relevant stuff, of course *ahem*. I’m looking forward to it. My class looks like a nice bunch of people so far, we get along well.

My bedroom

The past few days were spent buying stuff. A phone, a pillow (auch, no, you cannot sleep without – and it didn’t fit my suitcase), opening a bank account, and lots of mostly similar stuff. I’m pretty much set for the start of the semester now.

Central Park

Coding away

I’ll probably do no coding for a while. The reason for this is two-fold. Firstly, I’d like to spent all attention on my studies; parts will be hard, and I’d better get good grades. Secondly, I think I need a change of focus. Not only from coding to studying, but also from my many-years GStreamer effort into something else. GStreamer has progressed hugely in the past few years, we can encode in tons of formats, playback pretty much anything, and the latest releases have been very stable. I’ve done what I could to make it all “just work”, and have had very positive feedback on those efforts. I think my goal has been reached.

Lots of applications around still require work, though. I think the GNOME platform is ready for some really kick-ass applications that make it shine. I’d like to see how I can help to make that happen. How about iPod export in Rhythmbox (or Totem)? Media embedding in OO.org (Impress) is still high on my list. There’s probably more. Once I have more free time, I’d like to work on those things.

Jono Bacon, from LUG-radio fame, has published an article on Video Production on the Linux platform, featuring PiTiVi and GStreamer. Go read it!

So, Jeffrey and Ross showed their best sides in a funny misunderstanding, but Jeffrey had some good questions either way. Distributions will do their thing anyway, leacing the question: do the default applications really matter?

• GNOME has no photo-acquiring applications.
• With GNOME’s no-patent clause, can we really argue that we support DVD playback in Totem?
• We have a dozen of audio-CD players, and the only thing we all agree on is that the one considered default has to die. :-).

It probably doesn’t matter. Fedora will turn off the DVD support button either way, and regardless of the default photo app, either Novell will change it to F-spot or Fedora will change it to some non-mono app. So what honour is left for GNOME here? I think the very least we can do is promote our desktop for the few that do use our desktop with defaults (Debian? Gentoo? Arch? Probably some more… Also, let’s not forget jhbuild).
That means to promote one of the CD players that we like (Ross mentioned Sound Juicer and Totem; I’d default to Sound-Juicer since some users will want to rip rather than play, and Sound Juicer allows both), and well, if we think we can validly claim that we support DVD playback, even with all patents involved, we should default to Totem for that, too.

In the end, g-v-m isn’t all that large really, but for those happy few that use our defaults, it is very user-visible. We shouldn’t take it too lightly.

So last week, I went off to Barcelona to visit the other Fluendo guys and do some final meeting before I leave off for New York in two weeks. Can’t deny, it has its charm; going to one of the most beautiful cities of Europe (only seconded by Rome, in my opinion) for work, having a cocktail on the beach, and doing actual useful stuff in between, also. I left my laptop behind (so sorry all, no more DVD work as of this point; I no longer own a DVD drive). I will probably have some less time to spend on GNOME for a short while as my new studies start, so Fluendo has asked Tim to do some of this work, also. Prepare to be stunned by one of GStreamer’s best bugfixers! I’m sure Tim will do an amazing job for GNOME.

Since I’ll be off in a couple of days, I’m currently selling all my household stuff. Basically like the cleaning that you’re supposed to do every spring, but you never get to actually do it. Right now, it goes like this:

“look, there’s my harddisk. It contained my first GNOME checkout ever. I can’t do away with that. No, really, that is special for me.”

(Ok, so there’s also non-geek memories attached to stuff, but you get the idea.) It has to go, all of it. My bed, my stereo, dishes, books, CDs, everything. It’s weird to throw it all away, but you have to. On the positive side, I have a bigger-than-expected appartment in Manhattan waiting for me, and will hopefully have a small amount of money left to furnish it properly when I get there.

Although the change of environment will be huge, I can’t wait. New York is the single most exciting city in the world if you ask me.

Fun feeling, to “be home”. I got that feeling this week, after having been out a lot lately. First LugRadioLive in Wolverhampton, England, right that monday after my graduation, some hard days work, fully booked next weekend, some more hard days work and the past few days, I attended RMLL in Dijon, France. Gave a GStreamer talk in Dijon, too.
Some things went horribly wrong in Londen the very same morning that I left off for France. Scary feeling. Sad to see this can still happen. Wondering why just doesn’t help. If there is a solution, it is t eradicate all evil, and we all know how hard that is. Sad, once more. :-(. I must honestly confess I just turned off my feelings and forced myself in the train that morning.

But now I’m home. Finally, home. Good to be back, do nothing and just sit.

At RMLL, I’ve had some talks with Ralph Giles (from Xiph) about the MNG specs in Ogg, and promised I’d add support for them to GStreamer (after he, in return, admitted that Oggs granulepos is, in hindsight, quite silly). This would mean we can not only playback DVD subtitles, but we can also rip them in Ogg video files using Thoggen. I also got some more great ideas in the past few weeks, I’ll probably let them settle down a bit and choose some new cool side-projects to work on. Stuff that users want, basically. Stuff that I want.

Today, I graduated. At 15:00, I was in the lecture room. At 16:00, I gave a talk, which went well. At 16:40, I signed the final piece of paper. Drinks and dinner with friends and family, some more – excellent day. Result: I’m, as of now, graduated as Master of Science. Woo!

Me and D., just before; and me doing my last presentation.

Me receiving my laudatum from my supervisor Ronald Oosting, from the department of psychopharmacology at the University of Utrecht; and me receiving my diploma officially.

Finally, after all those years. Screw the words, we want screenshots:

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, with #301312, #306555 and #166783 applied, your Totem with GStreamer backend supports DVD menus. All of it.

You’ll need all latest patches from #306555, #301312 and #166783 applied to enjoy this… With those, DVD subtitles will work (e.g. “gst-launch-0.8 playbin uri=dvd://” or Movie -> Open Disc in Totem). I hope to integrate this cleanly into CVS somewhere later this weekend.

DVD menus, here we come.

So while others are discussing on whether or not to ship Gtk+ 2.8 in GNOME 2.12, I’ve taken another approach to being (or trying to be) useful. All sort of small finetuning to Totem, integrating the volume control keybindings with the applet and applying patches from others (mostly to GStreamer). All in all, this should be rather easy, but it’s taken me several days to get all bugzilla work sorted out to a reasonable state again.

The title “coolest hack of the day” goes to Jordan Saunders, who wrote a patch to control multiple tracks at the same time using the volume control applet. So while some may claim that this is silly, it really is not. Some cards, nowadays, lack a pure master controller; thus, they need to control several outputs to have the wanted effect, e.g. speakers + headphones. Some people (e.g. on fedora-devel) have suggested that GStreamer should emulate a master track for such cards, but I’m not quite sure how to do this yet. I may end up doing this at some point. Until then, this patch is extremely useful. An additional patch adds this behaviour to the keybindings, too. Now this is integration.

With all this movement going on, I haven’t been able to integrate the DVD subtitle support in playbin yet, I hope to do that this weekend or sometime soon after.

Hackergotchi
Some people from GNOME-NL complained about my current Planet GNOME hackergotchi sucking, because my eyes are closed. So they made a new one:

Feel free to put this as my new gotchi on Planet GNOME and Planet GNOME-NL!

So, yesterday morning, I was looking for something silly to do. So I decided to work on DVD subtitle support. Jan already did quite some work on it, but nothing working yet for me.

Image blending
The thing is, DVD subtitles are not text; they are run-time length encoded (RLE) images. So in order to support DVD subtitles, you need image mixing support. GStreamer already ships with a videomixer element, which does pretty much this. There’s also an alternative imagemixer implementation in bugzilla. Both of those don’t handle a non-continuous stream correctly, though. However, our current text-subtitle renderer, pango-textoverlay, does. So step 1 was to make an image blender, taking the various pieces of each of those elements. That was finished yesterday. With that, I can do general image blending (e.g. image-over-video, video-over-video, text-over-video, etc.).

Getting pieces in place
From here on, it’s pretty much getting pieces in their place, since we already had a DVD subtitle rendering element in bugzilla for a while. So now, it was just a matter of doing it right, which I got working this morning.

It’s not perfect yet, it has many (fixeable) loose ends right now:

• the subtitle pads are only created when we see DVD subtitles in the MPEG stream. We should create pads in advance by going over the stream or reading the DVD .ifo headers. As a workaround, I use a silly timeout value right now.
• Rendering is kinda slow.
• Alpha values are wrong (the subtitle in the screenshot is semi-transparent…?).
• This works on command-line, but obviously needs to be made workign in playbin so that it works in Totem, too.
• Once all that is done, the pango-textoverlay element needs to be changed in a pure subtitle renderer (without image blending), so that we can use that element in combination with this new imagemixer, too.

Yet another TODO item mostly solved. La grande question: when will DVD menues work? :).