So one day after returning the power supply of my Dell laptop stopped working. Due to being under warranty I was able to get a new one delivered from Dell, but it took me almost a full week to get the new one, which arrived on Friday. Turned out it was a DOA Power adapter I got…so today I figured I take now chances. I called Dell support, which I am still waiting to call me back to get them to send me yet another one, but I also ordered a new power supply from battery.co.uk based on a recomandation from Jaime. So far it looks good as they sent me a mail saying they shipped it within an hour of my order. Lets see which gets here first, the one from Battery or the one from Dell :)

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.

Every Wednesday we hold a wrestling tournament here at Fluendo in order to keep in shape and stay sharp. In the photo below Matthieu Garcia, our codec optimisation specialist shows of his headgear for the wrestling.

As it happens one of Fluendo’s two co-founders, Pascal Pegaz, has motorcycle racing as his big hobby. This weeked he invited everyone at Fluendo (and also a lot of other people) to attend the 24hour motorbike race at the track here in Barcelona. With a setup that included full access to the paddock and lots of food, drink and music to entertain us in addition to the race who where we to say no. It was a great race and our team looked poised to get a respectable position. Unfortunatly the bike broke down about 16 hours into the race. But we had a great time anyway and here is a collection of photos taken during bikerace,
take care to notice the prominent placement of Fluendo logos all over the place :)

Update!!
Thought I should also include a link to the ubercool video overlay system Julien made for the race. Its all using GStreamer! Anyway start by checking out this screenshot which demonstrates the system. Basically what it does is taking the video feed from the on-bike camera and the data collected by bikes onboard computer. Then the graphics are generated for the speedomeeter etc., and also a photo of the driver added in this case is a picture of Fluendo co-founder Pascal Pegaz who was one of our three drivers for the endurance race. In the photo he is crusing at a respectable 270 km/h. This system we hope to use more for future races. Check out Julien’s gallery for more.

So I got my TDT box set up yesterday and taken a step into the world of terrestrial digital TV. After struggling a bit with the cabling (the TDT box primary output is Euro SCART, but all the stuff I wanted to connect to I am using S-VHS cabling for.) Discovered that my hi-fi amplifier could do RCA to S-VHS conversion in the end and luckily there is also a RCA video ouput and a coaxial SP/DIF output on the box.

Anyway this move took me from 20 channels where the image where unwatchable on 15 of them, to 30 channels all with good image and sound quality. I am a bit suprised that TDT doesn’t do surround sound though, or maybe its just my cheap ass TDT box not supporting it. On the other side when I went to get cables yesterday I did look at the other TDT boxes offered and was suprised that none of them seemed to offer better connectivity than my own box. I mean when you compete in what I would assume is a rather standarized market I would think one way to try to beat the competition is offering better connectivity options than your competitors. Yet none of the boxes had for instance optical sp/diff or s-vhs output for example. They seemed all to only offer the SCART, RCA, coaxial SPDIF and coxial audio left/right output. Of course even if I know have 30 channels that doesn’t mean I got 30 viewable channels, most of them offer little of interest. At least I have an antenna cable now capable of TDT which means I can be a tester when we get to implementing this stuff in Elisa.

Instanbul:
Screenshots are so last year it seems, and everyone is now moving over to screencasts. Good news is that Zaheer has been working hard on making Istanbul the best screencast recording tool out there. With his latest changes Istanbul is capable of recording OpenGL based applications which in these days of XGL, AIGXL, Elisa, lowfat and so on being able to record OpenGL stuff is essential. So check out
Zaheer’s latest blog post for details.

Also be aware that the latest versions of Cortado our Ogg Theora/Ogg Vorbis playing Java applet has a working seekbar now. If you check out the Elisa screencast you see that a seeker bar appears if you let the mouse pointer rest over the video image. With this you can host screencasts on your webpage and even allow people to seek in the online movies.

I guess I also should use the chance to pimp LugRadio live this year (and myself doing a talk there).

Ok, so after a successful launch during GUADEC this year we now have the first alpha release of Elisa ready. Elisa is for those who don’t know it already our mediacenter solution for GNU/Linux systems (it actually works on MS Windows too as demonstrated during GUADEC). Currently it only contains some basic playback functionality and there is precious little developer documentation. But long term it will be a full PVR/DVB enabled solution with full suport for UPNP/DLNA systems. We will also document out plugin format and write tutorials on how to make Elisa themes. Hopefully many people in the community will find Elisa usefull and interesting. So jump over to the Elisa website and grab the first version for testing or to look at our selection of screenshots and screencasts. The screencasts are both available as downloads or viewable on the site through the Cortado java applet. People interested should join the mailing list or visit us in the #elisa channel on irc.freenode.com.

So at GUADEC and having a great time. To my fellow GUADEC participants: I want to remind everyone of the Fluendo party at El Tres down on the beach here in Vilanova tonight at 22.00. Free drinks and entertainment so be sure to come!

Do anyone here have or know where I could find the exact patches applied by Montavista to their MontaVista 3.1 LE/BE for ARM CPU’s?
I guess it should be possible to discover by digging through glibc and gcc mailing and patches lists, but I has hoping for a quicker fix. If you can help me find/get these patches please add a comment to the blog or mail me at christian at fluendo dot com.

Rambus wins patent claim

Saw today that
Rambus won in a courtcase over a memory maker called Hynix, the jury in case case said that all of Rambus 10 patents in question were valid. My first thought that if all 10 patents where found valid the jury probably looked more at the nationality of the companies involved and one being an ‘evil chinese’ company taking american jobs and the other being a ‘good american’ company defendings its intelectual property it was a clear cut case.

Become more and more sceptical of the jury system over the last years, from having started out as a strong supporter of it. I think in a lot of cases the jury doesn’t have the competence to judge a case and also they are more likely to be swayed by non-legal things, ranging from how charming the parties involved in the case are and local political considerations. Reminds me of how Jonathan Schwartz was saying that they didn’t want to have to take the Kodak patent case in front oa jury in Kodak’s home state as the jury would be to predisposed towards Kodak. I think this is also something SCO is trying to bank on in their ongoing case with IBM, that a local Utah jury will be more favourable to their plight as a small local company and not able to fully understand the technical questions involved and thus give them a favourable judgement.

On the other side, the recent patent case between RIM and NTP, shows that even professional judges are not as good as one could hope. With the judge trying to force a settlement even in the light of the patent office seemingly about to invalidate most of the patents in question.
Once again you had the situation of a foreign company vs a local one,
but I think the major problem here was the judge seemingly thinking forcing a settlement would give a result that was a ‘fair compromise’.

Of course that in many of these cases todays victim was yesterday’s troll doesn’t make things easier, especially in the court of public opinion.

Allergy pains

So it seems there is something in the air this year in Barcelona that is causing me grief. My eyeballs hurt, I have a constant headache and a general feeling of about to become seasick.

I do tend to be a little busted during spring, but I don’t think I was even close to this last year, so I guess there is more of whatever is causing it this year.

So we consider Wim our resident uber-hacker at Fluendo. Of course it is always nice to discover undisputable proof online that this is correct (apart from GStreamer 0.10 rocking so much). Anyway, from now on we will just call him ‘The Wim’ :)