Today, I'm working on supporting subtitles. This is not-so-easy because subtitles are non-continuous streams, easily allowing for threading deadlocks in the GStreamer design. But with some thinking and discussion with fellow developers, I have most basics working, and this automatically means that some subtitles are working already. Ok, so the font is too big and it's not Vera Bitstream; details, details.
Today, the Netherlands had to withdraw an item from the EU council agenda which would approve software patents in Europe, thereby bypassing the governments wishes in Netherlands, Germany and Poland (who disapprove, but whose EU representatives were forced to approve nevertheless), and also bypassing the European parliament. Read the full story.
It seems like we're not screwed just yet. EP will have to vote again over this issue during the next term, and I sincerely hope that the representatives will this time actually represent their countries' real opinion. Death to software patents!
FFMpeg update
I recently updated the ffmpeg snapshot in our gst-ffmpeg module. I've now (at some point) done successful test builds (including optimizations) on x86, PPC and Sparc using Linux, Solaris or freeBSD. RPMs (as usual) of current CVS for Fedora Core 3 are available on this repository. Some nice new features include the support of h264, which gives us a new feature that even mplayer doesn't support yet.
Now if only I could get those friggin' gaming formats to work. :).
From today: "I submitted the email you sent to the Admissions Committee and they review your application. They have decided to invite you to attend the Weill Cornell Graduate School Recruitment Weekend."
I'm not there yet, but this feels like a dream already. I'll go back to Manhattan, I'll relive my dream-come-true. Thanks to all. Wow.
Today, I uploaded a first version of a largely rewritten GStreamer Application Development Manual. Many parts need lots of work, but some parts are already useful (e.g. part2, the first chapters of part3 and the first two sections of part4). Feel the love.
Oh, let's not forget the necessary screenshot from this mms webstream.
KDE#2
Hm indeed! Happy to see the KDE people be happy with the app that I wrote, I hope to see parts back in other - more userfriendly - players such as kmplayer or kaffeine. In the end, let's hope KDE gets players with similar feature sets as Totem (ideally with GStreamer as a backend actively supported everywhere in the desktop environment).
KDE#3
I promise, I'm still a GNOME maintainer. ;).
Fabrice, from KDE.nl fame, came up with the great idea to organize a gettogether with several people interested in cross-desktop collaboration (think KDE, GNOME, other desktop environments). He wanted to specifically target multimedia, since that's pretty much of a hot topic lately in both KDE and GNOME. We hope to organize it somewhere early in 2005 either in the Netherlands or just over the border in Germany. All interested people (you're not required to be a devillish media-hacker, don't worry! Interest is good enough!) are hereby invited. We hope that some German, Belgian and Dutch people will show up. I'll try to be there, and let's hope Scott and Mark (from KDE-mm) will be there too.
Related, someone posted pictures from the Novell conference, where we had a nice gettogether and got social with the KDE-nl people. Here, you see me pillowfighting with one of 'em. ;). He survived, I swear.
Honestly, it was great to do. All four of us were rather new at this so we weren't quite sure how to get started, but we managed to grab attention with our shiny laptops with modern Linux-running laptops with the best of breed of applications (mostly stock GNOME-2.8), available for general trying pleasure by the audience and for answers to any questions. Some people have already used it - and their quesitons are thougher than the real new ones, who really just barely dare to touch the stuff ("will it explode?" - "Yes :)"). Good to do for a change. Let's not forget, this is our intended target audience.
Some of the other resellers were rather helpful towards us - one even mentioned interest in sponsoring small bits and pieces in our future efforts already. That's great, because it's not like we care for the EUR 25 that we spent on posters and flyers, but you don't want to do that each time. Getting refunds for travel expenses would be even better, buyt let's not chear too early just yet.
Especially interesting were the encounters with the KDE-nl members. We ended up doing some sort of a pillow-fight, for fun of course, and (now on to the serious part) we had an incredible amount of success in trying to set up some shared efforts. Obviously, setting up is not the same as doing it, but clearly the intention to work together on certain things (like organizing local hacker meetings and such) is definately there - and face it, we're too small to do such things alone. Special thanks to Fabrice from KDE-nl for being a great help here. Well done, dude! The sponsorships mentioned above would definately help here. Let's hope we can get this going in a few months. I'd love to have a small hacker meeting with some Dutch (and neighbours) KDE-/GNOME-hackers.
I'll see if I can post some pictures tonight. I've been up from 6:30AM this morning until now (midnight) and I've had a headache for quite a few hours now. Enough. :).
Now, you can help! In this blog, you'll find this RPM repo which regularly provides new RPMs of the current CVS of GStreamer and Totem for Fedora Core 3. Use at your own risk, and don't forget to report bugs! Many thanks to Felix for doing this.
For those that want to report bugs, here's a list of known ones (from the top of my head):
Real...
Now that I'm at this topic anyway, can I please publically request Real to either back down from the free software community or make it possible for us to communicate with their Real-format modules? I've seen enough split tongues in my life already. Real is an extremely bad player in the free software community. It solely abuses the community to add features to their so-called open Helix project (with forced permission to steal code) to consequently really steal this code and embed it in the actually somewhat useful but closed-source and highly-IP-protected Real player. Open up so we can embed Real content in GStreamer. Legally. Thank you.
Edit: if any of the Real people reads this, also re-read this message on desktop integration. To add up to that, also note that we've now been chosen as default for KDE(-4.0), too.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!