Rhythmbox

There are lot of nice developments happening these days. After having been using Banshee for a while I have to say that Rhythmbox have won me back. The work that has been put into polishing RB over the last months have been incredible. There are so many little details I just love now with the current GUI, like the beautifuly fading in/out of album covers. I am also happy to see that all my emusic bought songs gets album cover art now in rb, something I never got before with any other player. The Play queue in sidebar option is also very nice, and the source list has been polished up and just looks sweet atm. Thanks!
Also happy that the Rhythmbox team is now working on relicensing RB to the same licensing setup used for Totem enabling distro’s to both ship RB and also ship support for non-free formats like Windows Media and MPEG.

Totem

Totem has also gotten a lot of love recently, especially the Mozilla/Firefox/Epiphany etc. plugin. It now registers itself with four plugins in order to handle as many as possible of those weird detection scripts used out there, with one plugin pretending to be Windows Media player, one pretending to be Real Player, one pretending to be Quicktime player and finally one being just Totem :). Also been a lot of work on the playlist handling fixing a bug where in some cases Totem handed GStreamer a playlist instead of the actual media uri. A big thanks to Bastien and Christian Perch for this work. We did find a few new bugs due to it in some GStreamer plugins, but hopefully we get on top of those quickly enough.

Fluendo Windows Media plugins

The Fluendo windows Media plugins continues to see a lot of work and polish. One thing we are working on getting working perfectly currently is allowing you to transcode only one of the streams in a file. For instance the pipeline below would convert the WMA audio into MP3 while keeping the WMV video as it is. The advantage of being able to do this is that the video quality doesn’t get further degraded as video isn’t decoded and encoded again, its just demux and remuxed back in with the transcoded audio.

gst-launch filesrc location=leavestech_gp_0516_700.wmv ! fluasfdemux name=demux .stream_2 ! queue max-size-time=0 max-size-buffers=0 ! progressreport name=v ! fluasfmux name=mux ! filesink location=leavestech_as_mp3.wmv demux.stream_1 ! queue max-size-time=0 max-size-buffers=0 ! fluwmadec ! audioconvert ! progressreport name=audio ! lame ! mux. -v


Vacation time

Heading up to Norway on Sunday for a two week vacation. It is actually the longest non-stop vacation I ever had (not counting my between jobs trip around the world). Looking forward to relaxing and spending time with my family. Only thing that frustrates me before leaving is that I managed to forget to go to the Spanish tax office today to pick up my certificate showing I am a Spanish resident and tax payer now. Well I guess at this point two more weeks doesn’t matter that much anyway.