After a lot of back and forth I finally got Linux installed on my PS3. Ended up installing Yellowdog Linux. Not sure how much I will be using it though due to the lack of OpenGL support and access to the video card. Would have been nice to run Elisa on it though, but I guess once we get around to doing a DirectFB backend for pigment.

Linux on the PS3 feels a little ‘raw’ due to the graphics issue, and while the Sony people I talked to about it put the blame on NVidia for refusing them to make the GPU available in the hypervisor I think the value for Sony in having people being able to learn how to program for the PS3 under Linux should be big enough to do the needed legwork to get the GPU available with OpenGL support. I could see people even using this box as their primary desktop machine in such a case.

Suprised me also to see that YDL ships GStreamer 0.10.4 on the box, which is rather old at this point. A brand new distro like YDL 5.0 should have been able to update this. My next target is to try and compile the Fluendo plugins on the box to see how they perform. The combination of 64-bit and BigEndian might of course reveal some more bugs even.

DVB and Elisa

Got myself two WinTV NOVA-T-500 cards today. I gave one of them to Philippe so he could come through on his promise to get DVB support into Elisa if I got him such a card. The card is a nice dual tuner one, so its perfect for also making sure we can support watching one program and recording another.

On the topic of donating hardware to people. I have already promised to pitch in on the Delta 44 card that Jono is buying for Tim which I think should also help us resolve the issues that Davyd Madeley reported in his latest blog entry regarding his Alesis io|2 card with GStreamer and Jokosher.

New queue element for GStreamer

One of the things which reduce the user experience of GStreamer today is that the current element used for buffering is not very nice. Meaning that if you have bandwith problems with streaming audio or video it will be very noticeable and give you a less than nice experience. Wim just made sure we took a big step forward in that
regard today with the new ‘queue2’ element commited to CVS. While it doesn’t take us all the way there it do improve upon the current situation a lot. This work combined with Wim’s recent code magic to improve RTSP support should take us a big step forward towards being a very good library for doing network streaming clients.

That the RTP work has been highly anticipated seems obvious based on the huge number of questions about RTP support we get onto gstreamer-devel mailing list. The same goes for the windows support which seems to have a lot of people testing it out. If only we could get more people onto testing our MacOSX support also to make sure it gets rock solid. Hopefully when we get a new release of gst-plugins-good out with both the MacOSX and Windows support included it will get us more users also on the Mac platform.

Jokosher

Getting a new piece of software stable and widely usable is hard and one quickly realize that working on the developers machines is not the same as working for everyone else. Which is was nice to see this blog entry by Niels Kjøller Hansen where he talks about latest version of Jokosher working for him. Still a lot of work remaining for Michael, Laszla, Jono and the rest of the crew before Jokosher has reached its full potential. I guess there are two major items on the todo going forward as I see it which need being taken care of, one being support for more advanced multichannel soundcards for recording, the second being making sure all the needed GStreamer plugins are in gst-plugins-good so distributions can package them easily. Today a few of the needed Jokosher plugins are in CVS of plugins-bad which of course makes it harder for people to get everything they want/need.

Tribal Trouble

I have blogged before about the game Tribal Trouble which is available for Linux. I was happy to see that they decided to
release their sales statistics recently. The most interesting point is probably that Linux sales accounted for as much as 11% of their total sales. I think that is a high enough number to make doing a linux port interestinng, especially for smaller game publishers.
The nice guys at Oddlabs also released the terrain generation engine they made for Tribal Trouble under the GPL.

I also came accross this recent Ryan “icculus” Gordon interview on linuxgames.com. If Linux ever becomes a mainstream games platform I think Ryan personally probably deserves something like 75% of the credit.

Just discovered the photo tagging feature of facebook. It lets you click on various people/objects in your photo and facebook then tries to give you a square box centered around the object to clicked on, in other words they have some basic shape recognition stuff built in. What you usually do is mark the people who are in the picture, and if they are your friends on facebook they will be told that a new photo with themselves are online. Also the image will be added to the link with photos of the person in question on their facebook profile page. You can also tag other people’s photos, but they will have to approve your tagging before it becomes public.

While simple I found it pretty nifty actually. We will hopefully be enganging in a huge EU funded project at Fluendo starting in January. If that project goes through it would be nice to see if we can add a feature like that for video’s as part of that project as collaborative editing and metadata handling is a big part of the project. Of course the technical challenges are much bigger in the context of video so it might not make the cut as it wasn’t concretely planned for in the current proposal. But no matter what the project will be a huge boost for the Pitivi project and the features we offer in Pitivi.