Dependence on non-free drivers

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The effort to create a more beautiful effort is moving us quickly into a situation where the future desktop depends on hardware acceleration provided from the graphics card. The problem is that while 2D drivers are available as free software for the most part, the major graphics cards makers keep their 3D drivers closed. If you wanted good 3D acceleration under Linux the non-free NVidia and ATI drivers has been the way to go for a long time now.

So adding a ‘hard’ dependency on 3d hardware acceleration will implicitly mean we are basing our free desktop on non-free drivers feels like a step backwards. On the other side I don’t feel not going down the route of making our solution more visually appealing and hopefully also more usable is a viable option either, so I am not suggesting that these efforts gets rejected or stopped.

Hopefully the increased use of 3D will also lead to increased interest among free software developers to actually make free 3D drivers (and thus finding enough resources to overcome the difficulty of reverse engineering current cards) or that the increased use of 3d will increase the pressure from distribution makers and consumers to get ATI and NVidia to open their drivers. Anyway I hope I am wrong to be a bit worried about how this ends up and instead this leads to a big increase in contributions to things like MesaGL

Back from 3GSM

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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’.

Productive day

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Got a lot of little issues fixed today. Wim fixed the RTSP element taking us one step closer to RTSP stream protocol support in the players. Edward ported the ffmpeg demuxer plugin, adding support for tons of new formats. Tim checked in his cdxa plugin port and the dvdread plugin port, giving VCD support and making a big step forward towards DVD support in Totem for 0.10. And Thomas fixed many small issues to polish of our mobile phone streaming for Flumotion.
I ended up doing some thumbnailing testing with Totem after a claim it was broken. Worked nicely for me. Only format which didn’t thumbnail at all was Real, but hopefully that is a small bug to sort out. Nice to see even the Flash files getting thumbnailed :)

Things are also starting to fall in place for our media center solution. Will blog more about that after the weekend, with some screenshots of our current proof-of-concept.

Community help for Surround Sound

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Tim has been working on a patch to
enable Surround Sound in GStreamer 0.10. Due to limited hardware available we really need people in the community to help out with testing it so we can make sure its 100% before merging it into an official release. So if you have surround sound hardware (not spdif) with your computer please grab that patch and gst-plugins-base CVS and compile and report back your findings to that bug report linked above.

Pitivi is now in GNOME CVS and in GNOME bugzilla

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So Edward got Pitivi, the worlds coolest non-linear editor project moved over to GNOME CVS and added to the GNOME
bugzilla. Which means you can now check out pitivi using your favourite GNOME CVS account. Also to make sure I went down in the history books I made sure to file the first Pitivi bug report ever. Also getting a bit envious of all those people with developer this or that behind their name I spiced up my own description a bit.

Icon removal issue

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It seems that some icons got removed from the gnome-icon-theme recently which has caused both problems and some debate. To me there are two issues here. The first is that I think we should start seeing our collection of icons as part of our ABI stability promise. Removing and changing icons names at regular intervals have been the norm for some time now, and as someone who has worked on maintaining themes its been a pain. Application developers and users also have a right to be upset if icons they IMHO rightly could expect to be there suddenly are gone and their applications breaks due to it.

The issue of wether we should have those icons displayed in Nautilus is another separate issue. I don’t have any strong feelings on it, but I think it would have been a better approach to at least add an option of getting those textual descriptions back through a gconf key enabling emblems. So that the people who wanted to keep textual descriptions could do so by enabling one gconf key and emblems would appear where before ‘hardcoded’ images where used. That solution would also allow for a more i18n friendly setup.

Drawings of Mohammed

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The recent ruckus about the caricature drawings of Mohammed is curious.
The reactions seems a bit misplaced considering that there have been much harsher criticism published of Islam and Mohammed in various books, papers and tv programmes over the last few years than these drawings.

One thing is clear to me. If there is anything that needs to be kept it check through public criticism so is it religion. The Church too used to try to keep criticism silent by calling upon blasphemy. They
didn’t stop with the calling upon though, but had people arrested or killed too. Either directly our through local governments under their sway. Luckily Europe has left the dark ages behind and through public criticism of the church and christianity the era of englightenment came about.

Today I was shocked to find that the Catholic church dared bring forth a statement that they want to bring back the bad old times where they and Christianity where impossible to critisize. The Vatican stated the following – The right to freedom of thought and expression … cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers. Right, so let the book burning start again eh? I guess they would love to burn the Da Vinci code for instance.

That there are violent reactions in the Islamic world is of little suprise, most of these countries are poor underdeveloped dictatorships, rallying against the evils of the free world is the bread and circus those governments provide for their populations, to keep the population to occupied to wonder why their glorious political and religious leaders are unable to provide them with anything but anger and poverty.

GNOME Webshop available or ?

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One thing that was worked on by the board last year, or mostly by David Neary, was getting a GNOME webshop going.
Well it seems we got beaten to the punch. Well at least we know what the Gnome looks like now :)

Good wine experience

I used to play the Magic the Gathering card game a lot some years ago. I came across an advertisement for a MtG computer game the other day which made me remember that there used to be a computer version of the original card game. I found the demo online of the original game and tried running it under Wine. Worked like a charm, I was almost suprised when both the installation and running of the game worked perfectly. Only minus was that sound support didn’t seem to work, but still I had some fun hours playing with the simple demo decks :) Good going Wine hackers.

Virgin Radio UK

Usually when you contact a media company through their public communication channels you feel you are sending stuff into the void.
I have had a very positive experience with
Virgin Radio UK in this regard as they have updated their streams page fixing all the issues we have pointed out with them, randing from playlist problems to misnamed stream naming. Anyway now their streams
have perfect playlists and correct naming. A few bugs to sort out on our side still to handle everything, but I am sure we get there. Thanks to James at Virgin Radio for his help and assistance.

Emusic followup

Also Edward at the office signed up for emusic now. He tends to download whole albums more than me so the lack of a nicely working Linux client came up. Found the open source EmusicJ created by Robin Sheat. Works very nicely.

Good progress on 0.10 items for 2.14

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Just noticed that Ross closed the port GStreamer to 0.10 bug as resolved. Things are also looking good on the GNOME Media side with the planed release for today making sure everything is ported and working nicely.

Julien and Tim have also been making very good progress on getting Totem up to speed, with Julien commiting first stage support for .sub subtitle files to CVS yesterday. And now working on polishing it up with proper seeking support.

Another long standing issue now getting some attention is that of multiple soundcards and USB soundcards. Jürg Billeter is now hacking on the problem and hopefully this will give us a really sweet solution for this problem. Go Go Jürg!

Travelling in Barcelona

So I got of my lazy ass yesterday and onto my bike. I biked all the way up to Tibidabo which is a church and ammusement park located on a mountain behind the city. It was heavy going getting up there, especially as I had no clue on how to get there I just biked straight ahead, which meant making my way through some residential areas and also through narrow forrested paths climbing the mountain. Going down as easier as I just followed the main road, although I thought I where to freeze my fingers off :)

GPL and DRM – the real battle

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In an earlier blog entry I commented on the DRM provisions in the GPL 3 draft and why I felt they where empty grandstanding from the side of the FSF. A lot of people from various side of the fence seems to disagree. A moronic Microsoft employee muses that ‘With it’s anti-DRM provisions, …….., open source loses as proprietary software rushes in to fill the void left by GPL code.’. My only reply to that is; yes, as we all know all DRM related software today is using the GPL…..the void caused by DRM implementations no longer being possible to license under the GPL will be overwhelming……. If this is the kind of thinkers Microsoft must hire these days then they are in bigger trouble than I thought.

On the other side the Groklaw crowd is discussing if the current DRM provisions in the GPL v3 draft can be worked around. Yes, once again we see the belief that the amount of people spending energy on trying to do DRM systems under the GPL license is huge. To the Groklaw crowds defence they are also discussing the point the I was trying to make, that the DRM provisions might have uninteded side effects.

Fighthing DRM the only way it can be fought

Anyway I have come to terms with that most of the extended community at this point follows the policy that they are ready to fight something to their death as long as it doesn’t inconvenience them in
any way. So they spend their morning screaming online against the evils of DRM systems and software patents before going down to the local store to by a new DRM using DVD, sporting patented media formats.

Anyway I figured I should try to actually do something which will have a real effect if more people starts doing it. I signed up for a music store which sells DRM free music. emusic offers DRM free mp3 downloads of their whole catalog, which was much bigger and had more well known names than I had expected. They even give you the first 75 songs for free. True, I will not find the common radio hits there, so I have to live without Brittney and Madonna, but at least I get DRM free music.
To bad they don’t offer Vorbis downloads, but once again if enough free software people sign up and start requesting it then I think they are still small enough to actually listen to us. Anyway I am now listening to some cool music from a band called Ladytron. I also found some nice Frank Zappa songs there. I guess the lesson I am trying to teach is that action speaks much more than words; which maybe is something the Slashdot crowd should take to heart? :)