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
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
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
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 ?
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
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
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? :)
Continued stream testing
Thanks to Tim, Bastien and James from Virgin Radio we where able to resolve a lot of issues with the streams today.
None of the streams ‘bork’ out anymore. Those that don’t work will nicely tell you so. A pleasant suprise today was that with the playlists and their parsing fixed, the Real streams worked nicely. The AAC+ stream also got nicely fixed today by Tim.
The RTSP only streams (like the one called Real 10 AAC) still doesn’t work and won’t start to work until we get someone interested in helping with the RTSP support.
Also have some weird WMA or MMS issues which makes the WMA stream not work properly atm. Need to have Julien to look into that I think in order to figure it out. Although not having any firm proof I do suspect mmssrc, but I guess that is partially cause I know libmms is as good as orphaned and in desperate need of someone to come and adopt and love it.
Still all in all some good progress today, and once again a big thanks to Tim, Bastien and James for their efforts.
Testing GStreamer 0.10 and Totem
Seems Virgin Radio UK are streaming in every possible format known to the Gods above and probably a few even the gods don’t know about. Anyway I figured it be a good test for GStreamer and Totem, so I went through their streams to see which work and which needs more work. Things aren’t quite as rosy as I had hoped, but apart from the issue with chained oggs there wasn’t anything I would consider embarasing either. Most if the issues where related to our RTSP support being early stage though. Wim did write a rtspsrc element some time ago, but there has been little RTSP client side work happening since then. Hopefully someone with an interest in RTP and client side support for it will take a look at these streams and totem and start hacking to get them working. Should be doable within a week or two, including writing the needed depayloaders, but it of course depend upon how much RTP and general programming experience one got.
Of course everthing wasn’t about missing functionality in GStreamer. Two issues where one which needed to be resolved by Totem’s playlist parser, one of them which bastien fixed right away. Tried mailing Virgin Radio reporting that their playlist needing fixing, wonder if they will ever get back to me on that :).
In related news I managed to view a windows media video in Mozilla using the Totem browser plugin today using the Fluendo Windows Media plugins. the MadModMike demo video from Nvidia worked fine. Was a tiny stride issue in the wmv decoder, but that should be a quick fix for Julien and David. As soon as that issue is fixed I will send out the Windows Media plugins to our beta testers.
Since I am on the media support issue. Got a new issue of Red Hat magazine today. Was happy to see that the Ogg format was back among the video formats supported and that it was of good quality this time. Good going Red Hat!
Multimedia keyboard howto
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