Older blog entries for rbultje (starting at number 75)

Select
As you can see in this screenshot (clickertyclick), we now support language selection. The same method seems to work for selecting subtitles, too. In the screenshot, I'm swapping between an AC-3 and a LPCM soundtrack on a DVD. Note that DVD subtitles don't actaully work yet, but with the recent work, this won't be more than a minor adjustment to get working.

Some small TODO items before I commit the subtitle + stream selection patches (they'll be committed together):

• Stream disabling isn't perfect yet.
• The patch to the queue element makes our testsuite fail on Ogg radio (argh!).
• Font selection for the subtitles.

Where we are:
So far for the good stuff. In the recent Gnomedesktop.org article on the new GStreamer releases, I was kind of stunned by attitude, but the main point is a good question: how far are we (cmp. mplayer/xine)? So let's see. Note that I'm talking about my local version here, which is not CVS (although all my patches are available through bugzilla) and definately not a release.

• Media support: we support most popular media formats (e.g. h.264/AVC or MPEG-4), we're on par there. Compared to Xine/mplayer, we're still missing WMV9 and QDM2, and that won't change anytime soon. All of those depend on binary .dll loaders, which we don't support. Another area in which we lag is Real-media support. Real appears to be randomly threatening parties with legal action if they talk to their shared libraries (this recently happened to the Matroska team), so we're not too motivated to do that. There's a whole bunch of more exotic formats that we support and they don't (e.g. monkeysaudio, musepack).
• Input support: we mostly support the same sources as them (mms, http, file, dvd, audio-cd, vcd, svcd). We don't support rtp/rtsp, they do.
• Special features: we all support language selection, subtitles (although no DVD subtitles yet). Xine additionally supports DVD menus, which we don't (in Totem), neither does mplayer.

There's also some areas in which we don't lack with respect to them, but they still need fixing, e.g. error messages (our errors displayed aren't exactly HIG compliant in some cases) or metadata display (although we support metadata, it isn't always displayed in totem; I know why, but I don't have time to fix it). So in short, TODO list (in random order):

• DVD menus.
• DVD subtitles.
• RTP/RTSP support.
• WMV9/QDM2 support.
• Better Realmedia support.
• Better error messages.
• Improve metadata display (e.g. in Totem).

So that's not too bad, but far from perfect. The thing that does annoy me in the gnomedesktop.org comments is the random attitude where Joe Random User will tell me what to work on and how important his requested $feature is for the general wellbeing of GStreamer or GNOME. During the past three months, I've worked non-stop on improving such things, and it starts feeling rather endless. But seriously, everyone can work on fixing and improving error messages in applications, so why isn't that happening? So let's try something else. Here's your chance, interested hackers and soon-to-be hackers. There's lots of small things that need fixing, that are not too hard but will be a very valuable contribution to GStreamer and GNOME. I'll gladly help you getting into this, I'll poke you in the right direction if you need that and generally be available to answer questions. If you want to contribute, come online on #gstreamer on irc.freenode.net or mail the list, and by doing that, contribute to a very lively part of the GNOME desktop!

Life:
This appears to be the section in which people with a hackergotchi tell you what they've been doing yesterday. So, I went to a music concert in Amsterdam with performances from DJ Tiesto, Blof, Acda en de Munnik and some more. Was pretty cool. Met up with some people there and got home late and had a headache. It's interesting how young people in this country are being motivated to be involved in society (this was charity for Asia); disaster happens, so let's do a cool concert. They did this for Theo van Gogh, too. It feels kind of weird to have a great time because a disaster happened... Ohwell, I guess it works, it was crowded as hell. :-).

Cupid
Tonight, I released a first version of Cupid, a GNOME-/GStreamer-based video capture application. See http://ronald.bitfreak.net/me/cupid.php for the download page and screenshots.

2005
Happy new year all. I have a bad headache... Mornings-after suck. Ohwell. :).

Hands in my pocket
Some people have shared thoughts and criticism on the help from around the world after last week's catastrophe in Asia. I can't understand this viewpoint. It is a gift. How can you possibly criticize that? In the Netherlands, people shared thoughts on how we should stop spending money on fireworks and spend the money on Asia instead. Wtf?!? If my contract said that I was supposed to spend money on things other than my own choices, I would've known, right? Other people criticized the US government decision to spend "only" 15, 35, or 350 mln. USD on Asia. Again, wtf?!? Get a grip dudes, it's not your money, it's not your decision. Hands off. The fact that I spent a certain percentage of my money on Asia is my choice just as well. I don't care what my neighbour does, and I definately won't speak bad about him just because he does not share my opinion on this. After all, it's a free world we live in.

Subtitles #3
GStreamer is da bomb. .sub file from GUADEC of 2 years ago, plus Jakub's cool GStreamer logo movie. TWD is near. :).

Subtitles part 2
Pics say more than words. You're welcome.

Lagging competition
Although GStreamer is said to be miles ahead of its competition in some aspects, we seriously lag in some pretty darn simple other cases. Worst of all, most developers don't feel like those simple cases are of any importance. We're seriously mistargetting our intended audience here.

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.

Democracy can win
For the second time in a matter of days, the Dutch government had to withdraw a rather controversial decision. Only days ago, an agreement with software giant Microsoft for delivering software to more than 250,000 computers over a period of 3-5 years was cancelled after companies and organizations raised concern because European rules for required public biddings had been bypassed.

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!

No-Bug-Week for GStreamer
In the past few days, we solved an incredible amount of bugs. Most are things that reproduce with only a few movies, or only for some installations. I think this implies that we *are* actually getting better. Finally. Bugzilla implies that we now have 163 bugs left. This excludes enhancements, gst-rec, gst-editor and gst-player. With those last modules included, we're now at 175. With enhancements included, we're at 217. Not bad, knowing that we were far above 300 only 2-3 weeks ago.

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. :).

New York revisited
From my motivation letter: "Roughly one year ago, I stepped into the professor's office in Utrecht, the Netherlands. ``I'd like to give it a try'', was my short answer, and six months later I left off for New York City, leaving student life, a job as software engineer and my friends behind. Now, six months later, I've just finished my six-month visit at the Cornell University pharmacology research labs. It has changed my thinking. [..] The facilities at Cornell were amazing, the research was stunning, the people were very motivating and the city was a paradise for me. I want to continue living that life for many more years."

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.

Documentation
Documentation are the paria of the free software movement. The thing is, you know you need them, but you don't want to write them since it takes time. In the end, you spend 10x as much time explaining various things to people. And then you decide to write docs anyway. And then people rewrite stuff and it all falls apart.

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.