Older blog entries for Uraeus (starting at number 387)

Back in Barcelona after spending Christmas back in Norway. Had a great time both together with family and visiting friends in Norway. Managed to go back with trice the luggage I had when arriving, of course half of that was the ceiling fan I bought for the bedroom.

Also spent quite some time watching tv as the Asian tsunami news unfolded. Since many of the places hit badly in Thailand where very scandinavian centric the catastrophe got even closer as scandinavians where heavily represented in the foreigners dead or missing there. Got a bit annoyed with some of the Norwegians returning home, who complained loudly about the Norwegian government not doing enough for them quickly enough. While there probably where things which could have been done better I think in the context that there had been a natural disaster which completely broke down local infrastructure and killed maybe as many as 100 000 people a little more humbleness would be in order. I have no problem understanding that the days for the survivors and hurt where long, but I am also sure that Norwegian embassy officials and others where not sitting around twinning their thumbs. They where probably working their ass off trying to help as many as they could as fast as they could, which probably was no easy task considering what had happened. Some where complaining that the Swedish government had done so much better and that the swedish officials had ended up helping norwegians too since there where no Norwegian officials there; well I am sure there are many cases where even Swedish officals where not there quick enough for Swedish citizens too. Instead of being angry at Norwegian officials for not managing to be everywhere for everyone I think they instead should be happy that we have such a close relationship in scandinavia that the Swedish officials could help them out instead.

Elijah: Havoc wasn't unemployed last time I checked :)

Ok, so due to the Ogg clips featured in Red Hat magazine being so horrible I did some quicktime to ogg transcoding testing with GStreamer today. I took the World of Warcraft Quicktime trailer and converted it to Ogg using this little script(qt2oggt input.mov output.ogg). The end result came out very nice so I made a screenshot of the Dwarf and one with the Tauren. You can download the whole Ogg here to see for yourself. Only frustrating part being that I had to use mplayer for the shot as Totem/GStreamer (and Totem/Xine for that matter) was to CPU heavy in non-xv mode for me to be able to use it. Guess we need to put some optimizations of this onto Ronald's todo list for next year.

Another nice thing I noticed is that the Ogg file is about 12 MB, while the Quicktime is 28MB (and image/sound quality about the same). Not a scientific test of course, but still a nice example showing that free formats do not have to be ashamed when being compared to proprietary ones.

Bug piles
Elijah's futile attempt to unpile Metacity have now been severely punished. While he has taken Metacity from 175 bugs down to 164 it is not nearly enough. The Ephiphany developers are also showing their weakness by only lowering their bug count from 178 to 155 since I uttered my big pile of bugs challenge. According to the Bug Summary GStreamer is now at 151 open bugs. Which means we can safely state that not only are Ephiphany and Metacity big piles of bugs, but also Gnumeric belongs in this category. If I where a developer on those projects I would be ashamed. They should look at GStreamer and learn from its developers how to make bugfree software :)

Had a hectic but fun weekend with Julia and Michael visting me . Was nice to see them again for the first time since we met on the trip in Borneo. Think we drank a little to much yesterday cause I was pretty worn out at work for the first half of the day. Think I definetly have to pop over to England for a visit in the new year.

Suddenly realized how few days I have left in Barcelona before going home for Christmas, think I need to do some present shopping tommorow if I am to be able to look my family in the eyes this Christmas.

Noticed Havoc pointing to the nice stuff in Red Hat Magazine today. To balance it out I guess I should point out that the Ogg Theora videos, like the 'choice' video and the Bob Young video about the Red Hat name are horribly broken in regards to audio/video sync. I guess they didn't use GStreamer to transcode the videos :)

Ok, we are now safely below Metacity in number of open bugs, with only 173 open, so I can now safely safe that Metacity is one big heap of bugs. The Ephiphany team seems to be cheating currently as they have closed a lot of bugs to since my last blog so we are still not past them. But look out we are not so easily done in :)

The GStreamer bugsquashaton continues. We are now down to 288 bugs including NEEDINFO's from well over 320 just last week. Using the statistics from the Weekly GNOME bug summary report we are down to 220 open bugs. Hopefully we manage to get the bug count low enough to fall out of that list. Currently Conglomerate is at the bottom of that shameful list (of top 15 GNOME bugzilla modules) so we need below 134 open bugs to get out. Next step is being less buggy than Ephiphany with 178 Open bugs and Metacity with 175 open bugs on that list. So watch out Ephiphany and Metacity developers, one or two more weeks and the GStreamer community can start refering to Ephiphany and Metacity as a big piles of bugs :)

Goetz Waschk the MandrakeLinux packager supreme mailed me today saying that Flumotion in Cooker now works like a charm for him. Which means we have our first report on Flumotion working with Python2.4 also. For me the flumotion-admin program segfaults on Mandrake for some reason to be investigated. Anyway I hope as many MandrakeLinux users out there try out the shiny sparkling Flumotion package. Thanks Goetz!

Still working on getting Flumotion integrated with Fedora. Mailed the fedora-devel list proposing Flumotions inclusion in FC4. Colin Walters seems to have some suggestions on how to do it nicely using ACL instead of groups. So hopefully the Red Hat bugreport will be reopened by Bill Nothingham now that Colin has a easier to implement proposal in it.

Ah, and my announced cool press release will be delayed till sometime durng Q1 of the new year, so I guess I have to figure out other ways to make some big splashes before then :)

For some reason I am now locked onto the top of planet GStreamer with an empty post. I thought first it had to be related to the problems with advogato last week and that the RSS feed from advogato had some problems, but looking at it I think its clean, besides planet GNOME do not have this problem.

On the other hand I do not understand what is the problem with Planet GStreamer either. I have tried deleting the cache multimple times, but the problem just keeps being there.

Maybe it is some strange characters or something in a blog entry triggering this, if that is the case I guess it will go away once the entry in question falls out of the date range planet grabs.

Noticed that my old Loki games titles don't work anymore on latest Fedora release. Found a thread on fedora-devel confirming it, but no solution. Guess it is the final goodbye to these games. Heroes3 was begining to be a bit old anyway.

Ronald has been working on getting asfdemux to handle the incoming mms stream from the libmms plugin. Works for manual command lines now see screenshot of a Evanesence video. It is made possible using this cute pipeline:
gst-launch mmssrc location=mms://cdns.winduprecords.com/windup/evanescence/video/dvdvid/evfoolvidlive_lrgstrm.wmv ! asfdemux name=d .video_00 ! { queue ! ffdec_wmv1 ! ffmpegcolorspace ! ximagesink } { d.audio_00 ! queue ! ffdec_wmav2 ! audioconvert ! audioscale ! alsasink }

In other news I also put up a page with the official Flumotion song. So if you need a tune to sing while streaming media onto the internet, this is it.

Once more trying to fix this broken entry.

Spent quite some time today trying to sort out the auto* stuff for libmms and its corresponding gst-mms plugin. Libmms from CVS now at least builds and dists nicely after my fixes, and the patch I sent of to mathrick for gst-plugins merges the plugin into that module nicely. All we need now is for Matrick to fix asfdemux to handle the incoming packets properly. Of course we still need either a native WM9 decoder or a binary dll loader to get video working for most asf streams, but even without that it means we could have our applications supporting wma based webradio's for instance. Libmms is a nice example of cross project pollination as the code is originally from Xine and relicensed to LGPL with the developers permission, a big thanks to Thibaut Mattern who is the original author.

Happy to see Jorn being back in #gstreamer. Seems Ronald's improvements of Totem+GStreamer convinced him that the time has come for getting Muine onto the GStreamer lovetrain.

Discussed a bit today about copyright statements in files and what they mean. Most people include a copyright/license header in their files, but most of those headers are not kept up to date or even point to valid copyright owners AFAIK. I mean in GStreamer most plugins say copyright Erik Walthinsen, cause his name is what is in the template/most other plugins. But since there has been no valid copyright assignment done, this is of course a false statement, the copyright is not Erik's (in most jurisdictions at least), it is still with the author of the code in question. Also people tend not to add themselves to the copyright when they edit the code so even if Erik was the original author, he is no longer the single copyright holder anymore even if the copyright header of the file says so. Secondly a lot of projects, like GTK+ and Xine, state in their headers that the copyright is with the GTK+ project or the Xine project. Which I think is false as there is no copyright assignment done to these projects, and none could be done as they are not legal entities.

The lack of care for such copyright headers raise a few legal questions/problems. For instance it do create some unclarity in case of relicensing request, eg. who do you need to ask. Another question is if invalid copyright headers have any influence on legal validity of the copyright or your ability to defend your copyright in case of a legal struggle. I don't know. I seem to have read that under US law if you don't uphold/protect your copyright you will lose is, which if true, could be interpreted as meaning that if you don't add your name to the list of copyright holders or put in a misleading copyright statement your claim of copyright can more easily be taken away in the case of a lawsuite. I tried looking at the GNU homepage to see if they had any advice on these issues, but I couldn't find anything. If anyone out there know some links that talk about the important/unimportance of these copyright headers please let me now.

A CVS branch has been started by Wim to implement the design proposals he mailed the GStreamer list with recently. Some things are already working well in that branch so hopefully it will soon reach a stage where its enough of a proof of concept to make it an official 0.9 branch. Very cool.