Older blog entries for rbultje (starting at number 79)

Cupid
I did some work on my video capture tool Cupid yesterday and today. I fixed some stability issues, crashers, added some sanity checks and I added a bunch of new features, amongst which:

• snapshot support (and since it has webcam support, this makes it a good webcam tool as well)
• overlay emulation (which means that if your card does not support hardware overlay, we will set up a background GStreamer pipeline to display video instead; again useful for webcams)
• minimal mode and fullscreen support, which make it useful to watch TV

There's some more needed, such as channel/tuning and remote control support, but all in all I think I've finally got my replacement for STV, which I wrote years ago. We're not tvtime yet, but adding a deinterlacer or text-overlay is nothing more than a GStreamer element, so I have good faith in it.

uraeus, to answer your question on the medical sector: there would be no such sector without patents. Medical research for a single drug can take up to many billions of dollars (or euros), with the end product being one single molecular structure that may or may not work. Research is very, very expensive. It takes years to earn back the R&D expenses.

Without patents in this area, all investments would be void, since everyone would just steal the competitor´s product instead. However, the acceptance of re-patenting of a specific mirror-formula of a product of which the original patent was expired (breath here :-) ), is an example that even in this field, patents are very much imperfect.

New toys require new toys
I got a new laptop yesterday, woohoo and thanks Fluendo. Obviously, this means that I need to get a copy of World of Warcraft or I´d be spoiling CPU cycles on idle() instead.

Somehow, it feels frustrating that modern machines have about as much video-RAM as my machines used to have real RAM. I guess I´m just an old fart.

Subtitles
Current CVS of GStreamer, plugins and Totem features subtitle and stream selection support. Go get it today. With many thanks, Felix has arranged RPMs for Fedora Core 3 once again (update: Felix also made a note on this himself):

http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/pkg/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/yum/deps
http://users.bromstraat.net/fkooman/fedora/gstreamer-cvs/$basearch

Put that in your yum.conf and you're set.

Also, since Benjamin worked on a puzzle game, I decided to make it work in Totem. Next stop: DVD menus.

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.