General

Asus Pro31S and Linux

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So I recently purchased an Asus PRO31S laptop and I figured I should report on how it plays with Linux in case other people out there are looking at the machine also. The specs are really nice using the new Intel Santa Rosa chipset, nvidia graphics, lightscribe capable DVD writer, Wireless card supporting up to 802.11n. It also sports a built in camera above the screen, built-in bluetooth and DVI out.

I am writing this entry on the laptop so obviously it do work, but I have to admit getting it set up was a much bigger challenge than I expected. The first problem was that no Linux distribution was able to properly detect and access the DVD drive. As you might guess this is slightly painful when trying to install linux as the DVD based installs fail as soon as the install for the first time tries to access the DVD drive. Managed to get latest Fedora installed in the end by using Network install. Once I had the core system installed I realized I needed the very latest proprietary nvidia driver to get X working at all, version 100.14.11. Problem is that the system seems unable to have the X display reset, so if I start the system with the graphical boot loader or try to go into a console I just get a black screen. So ctrl+alt+f1 etc., is not currently available and if I have the graphical boot enabled I will only get a black screen instead of the gdm login screen.

The Intel wireless cards works, well sorta. It seems to consider the signal strength very weak even if I am sitting next to the wireless router. With the original Fedora 7 kernel I needed to manually install the updated kernel driver from Intel, but with current kernel updates it seems to work fine out of the box apart from the signal strength issue. While I am not 100% sure at this point I also think the signal strength issue is what is making Skype etc., useless on the laptop.

The Asus also comes with its own annoying startup sound, you can turn it of in the bios, but it seems doing that causes the sound card to not initialize properly or something under linux, giving you zero volume sound.

Things which seems to work perfectly however for me on the laptop is the smartcard reader and the bluetooth support. The camera also seems to work fine with latest kernel updates.

Suspend partially works in the sense that I do seem able to suspend and then resume the system, but things like the wireless networking did not seem to want to resume again.

So the current status is that I have a useable laptop for my day to day needs, but there are still a lot of things that aren’t working fully. Hopefully the driver issues will sort themselves out over the next Months, but at this point in time it is not a laptop I would recommend for a great out-of-the-box linux experience.

GStreamer

The Incredible Summer of Code students

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One thing I wanted to do for a while, is write up an entry praising this years Summer of Code students working on GStreamer related projects. The success rate of a Summer of Code project is a highly uncertain thing for a variety of reasons including things like overly optimistic time estimates, underestimation of the difficulty in doing the task at hand, bad/missing communication between mentor and student and so on. And of course even in the cases where a student manages to meet the objective goal of the summer project it do not necessarily mean that the upstream project will be able to merge the results without further work.

Anyway, this year things seems to be progressing extremely well with few or no major hickups.

Michael Sheldon have been steadily progressing on integrating Telepathy and Jokosher and his recent screenshots of his progress are truly exiting. Applications taking advantage of the advanced infrastructure that has been built to do some innovative things is something we wanted to see happen for a long time and this one has also been on the blue-sky plans for Jokosher from early on. Some nice screenshots available here and here.

Sebastian Droge have been hacking on improving our infrastructure for doing media editing/manipulating applications as part of his Summer of Code and most of his fixes are already in GStreamer CVS. He is currently working on fixing the long term painful issue of accurate seeking in mp3 files, which has been causing pain and problem for both Pitivi and Jokosher for a long while. Not a highly screenshootable effort, but none the less a very critical one.

Thanks to the incredible work that Brandon Lewis has been doing on Pitivi as part of his Summer of Code we now have cutting in Pitivi which is a major milestone in getting Pitivi to a stage where its actually useful and not only showing a lot of promise. More on that including a screenshot in Edward’s blog.

I guess you all have read Daniel Siegel’s great blog entries outlining the development of Cheese. This photoboot like application just kicks ass and what is more I am sure we will be able to resuse a lot of the work of Cheese in for instance Empathy as that efforts gears up to take on iChat in the blingy chat client space.

Alessandro Decina has also been kicking ass on improving GStreamer’s DVB support, which he is working on for the Freevo project. He is initially focusing on DVB-S, but to make sure those of us viewing DVB-T didn’t get left out in the cold, I bought a DVB card for my own money and sent of to Alessandro :)

So to sum up, you guys rock!

General

My contact information and more

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After my last blog entry where I let it be known that a group of us left Fluendo I realized that I had forgotten to put up my new (old) contact information. So people who need to reach me/us can contact me on uraeus*at*gnome*org.

I also want to say thank you to all those who sent us emails and messages of support and best wishes, much appreciated.

General

No longer at Fluendo

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So as of today Wim Taymans, Edward Hervey and myself are no longer working for Fluendo. The same goes for Tim Muller who has been working as a contractor for Fluendo for a long time now. The reasons for us deciding to leave are many, but essentially I guess the time had come when we felt our prospects outside Fluendo were better than the ones offered inside. Our exact plans are not set in stone yet, but one likely outcome is that we set up our own company doing various kind of software and services around GStreamer, more on that in the coming weeks.

GStreamer

Coherence and the PS3

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So I have been spending quite a few evenings and hours recently working with Frank Scholz on sorting out the compatability issues between Coherence and the Playstation 3. The playstation 3 being a DLNA device turned out to be not very keen on communicating with systems only doing the ‘upnp a/v’ specification. So I gave Frank ssh access to my home machine and he tested various changes to coherence while I watched how my PS3 reacted to those changes.

It took us quite some time, but in the end we managed to get things working very well. When we reviewed our progress so far we very pretty happy with our progress. I was able to play mp3 songs, view photos both stored locally on my laptop and from Flickr. And finally we also got MPEG2 video playing fine. We still need to do more testing though to make sure all supported formats play well, currently that should include AC3 audio, WMA audio and MPEG4 video at least.

The automatic transcoding also needs more effort to work. But all in all this looks quite good currently and while we tested with the coherence test server all these features (and more) should automatically work in Elisa.

General

New codec releases

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We updated all the plugins in the webshop over the last few days with newer, faster, better versions. So if you have purchased our plugins just log into your account on shop.fluendo.com and ‘view’ your order. You will see a download link inside which will let you download the updated package. Especially the Windows Media packages contains a lot of improvements.

Big new release of Schrödinger

Just cut the 0.6.0 release of Schrodinger, our implementation of the Dirac video codec. This is a major milestone release as it should be fully bitstream compliant. This means that if you use Schrodinger to encode a Dirac file today you should be able to decode it with any compliant decoder in the future.
Of course you should wait for the 0.7.0 release at least before doing a major migration of your media collection as we might still have bugs causing us to not be 100% compliant. Anyway getting this release out is a big step forward for the project, and while there are still many improvements we want to see happen, it at least brings Schrodinger into the realm of being useful outside pure testing scenarios. Tim has also promised a new release of Thoggen soon with experimental Dirac support using Schrodinger.

Oddball entries

Ines, I love you

or ‘Ines of my soul/Ines del alma mia’ as the book is called in English/Spanish, made it onto my reading list as I was looking for something to read at the Oslo airport yesterday morning.

Always wanted to read something by Isabel Allende and this novel based on the colonisation of Chile was an interesting debut for me. Part of me love well done historic novels, another part of me tend to get a little saddened based on what is lost. That said I am no apologist, history is as the name implies history and while we still have to deal with the consequences of history today, there is little justice to be found trying to correct the past. Its better to spend energy trying to fix the issues of today than those of the past, although of course a lot of current problems have historic roots.

Anyway back to the book, it is written in the form of a self biography of Ines Suarez, a woman who played a key part in the establishment of Chile. It was nice to read a book with such a strong female character who maybe apart from a complete lack of doubt, seemed very believable in her ambitions, desires and dreams. I am sure the real Ines Suarez would be pretty happy about how she is depicted. Dealing with controversial parts of history, such as the colonial era is hard, but I think the book manages it pretty well. The books shows that as always, war is a dirty game and no matter how good your intentions are its next to impossible to come out of the endavour with clean hands. I definitely recommend reading this book to others.

General

Elisa and Playstation 3 interop

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I noticed on the semi official Playstation 3 blog that the upcoming 1.80 firmware will have DLNA support. This is great news as it means you will be able to share and exchange media between your Elisa system and your PS3. Supporting Intel ViiV and DLNA was something I pushed for in Elisa since day one. Thanks to the great work that has been going into Coherence ,the Python uPnP framework we are using, Elisa has very good support for these technologies already and we will of course make sure it will become even better as time goes by.

In regards to Elisa I am also very happy for the
just announced collaboration with the Ubuntu community to create a Ubuntu Media center edition based on Elisa. As I build my own mediacenter solution at home over the next few weeks I will probably try to get involved in that effort myself actually.

GNOME

Linux on the PS3

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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.

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