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’ :)

I came accross GMediaRender last night which is client for upnp based media servers, like the Intel Viiv systems for instance. We plan on integrating support for this functionality in our Elisa Media Center software so its nice to see others also looking into this area with GStreamer.

I also managed to put up some photos I took of our new office. Any free software people visiting Barcelona should be sure to pay us a visit at the World Trade Center.

Adding my blog to Technorati for the fun of it –
Technorati Profile

Back at the office today after spending the last 3 days at the 3GSM tradeshow. We helped one of our customers, SportAlert.com do a sucessful launch of their product, streaming sport events to mobile devices.
Also learned the hard way during the conference that I spend to much time sitting down in my job. The last half of every day at the conference was spent in pain with aching feet, neck and back.

A lot of interesting things on show at the conference. Was very happy for instance to see Nokia having 2 persons on the main booth dedicated to demonstrating the Nokia 770 and that these two persons always seemed to have a good crowd around them.

Was also nice to see the Lipsforum .org announcements about using GTK+ and GStreamer for mobile devices.

Also walking from booth to booth asking about people’s products it seem everyone doing some kind of software either had a linux port already or one was planned to start soon. Not that many years ago the answer would have been ‘linux? what is that?’

Next year maybe we do our own booth with Fluendo, but then again just walking around as we did this year also yielded very good results and a lot of interesting information.

New employees

So we have two new employees at the office now, both formally starting on Monday. Zaheer Merali is one of them, a well known long time contributor to GStreamer and also known as the creator of Istanbul. Also joining us is Matthieu Garcia (b0nk on IRC) who is an old friend of Edward (bilboed) and who will be doing codec optimisation work for us. A big welcome to both.

Media Center Solution

I also promised some more information about our media center solution in my previous blog entry. I have a couple of screenshots available for our early prototype which you can see here and here.
One of the core building blocks of the media center solution apart from GStreamer will be the Togra framework created by Jan (thaytan). We have also hired two people who will soon start at our Lyon office. I will announce their names in my next update on the media center solution, which we have baptized ‘Elisa’.

So thanks to Crispin
and the people commenting on his blog I at least figured out how
one creates new keyboard profiles for X11.

Step 1: Get the numerical code for the key using the ‘xev’ tool shipping with X

Step 2: Figure out the X11 code by looking up those numbers in /usr/share/X11/xkb/keycodes/xfree86

Step 3: Add a section to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/inet with those codes linking them to relevant XFree86 codes. (make a backup copy first) For my laptop that ended up with:

// Laptop/notebook Dell Inspiron 8xxx
partial alphanumeric_keys
xkb_symbols "inspiron" {
    key <I22>   {       [ XF86AudioPlay, XF86AudioPause ] };
    key <I10>   {       [ XF86AudioPrev         ]       };
    key <I19>   {       [ XF86AudioNext         ]       };
    key <I24>   {       [ XF86AudioStop         ]       };
    key <I30>   {       [ XF86AudioRaiseVolume  ]       };
    key <I2E>   {       [ XF86AudioLowerVolume  ]       };
    key <I20>   {       [ XF86AudioMute         ]       };
};

Step 4: Then make a unified patch by doing:

diff -u inet inet.backup > inet.patch

Step 5: And finally submit
a bug into the freedesktop bugzilla

Ok, some time ago I linked to some photos of the Fluendo sponsored motorbike from my blog. Now we have a demo stream up with a race video showing it in action. If you look closely at the red motorbike you see the Fluendo flower logo and you also see in on the walls in the garage and so on. Fluendo is truly racing ahead :)