Older blog entries for rbultje (starting at number 86)

Bugs, bugs, bugs...
So as Christian already said, I got a bit pissed off today when looking at bugzilla. I'd cleaned it up a few weeks ago, taking most dups out, applying most if not all pending patches, asking appropriate questions to the unclear ones, etc. We got down from almost 350 to 180 by doing that. And we were, within a week, already back to over 200.

Cleaned up again today, back to 175 (incl. enhancements, excl. needinfo), and - as Christian said - out of GNOME's hall of shame. Yay. I guess hall of shame isn't really a good word, it just implies your software is used a lot. Unused software gets no bug reports, no matter how buggy it is. So I guess we should be happy with the amount of bug reports we get. Good job, people. Keep them coming. We still have many bugs and I hope to get to an acceptable level of workability (which is not the same as 'well, that may crash and this may be broken, but playing this specific Ogg works!') when GNOME 2.10 comes out.

Goners
However, I won't be triaging for a while, at least I hope so. I'm off to Manhattan thursday morning for my in-take talks at Cornell medical gradschool (plus the usual get-to-know-the-city night-stuff), and am flying onwards to Barcelona (GStreamer team 0.9 summit) and Brussels (FOSDEM) right after. I'll post some pictures if I can.

Gotta love it. I definately do. :-).

Cupid and DV
Today, I found out that if you use today's CVS of a lot of things, Cupid can display video from your DV cam as well. Of course, capture is far more interesting but, well, y'know, one thing at a time.

In other news, I'm said to have ported a plugin to the threading branch in GStreamer. It's not hard, which is good. I'll port some more plugins later this week. This branch may end up becoming GStreamer-1.0.

Toothfairies
Today, the toothfairy came by to tell me something really cool is happening!

Who wants to join
Several people have bugged me about a blog that I did earlier, about helping new people to get into GStreamer programming. I've been rather unhelpful so far ( :-( ), but today, I've finnaly setup a few new "tasks" in the GStreamer / GNOME tasks page. The first has general GStreamer tasks, the second has ones specifically targetted at GNOME modules using GStreamer. Bug me for more info on any of them, I'll probably add a few more sometime soon. They're fairly simple, serve as a good introduction into the codebase while only touching small parts so it doesn't get too difficult. Needless to say, the tasks are well-documented for a newcomer.

Doing stuff
As days move by, you slowly see cool new things happening.

• Fluendo now has a couch in their office. I just have to try that out sometime soon.
• I got AMR (the sound format of .3gp movies, which are produced by mobile phones with a cam) to work - audio-only needs a small bit of more work before it's functional. See bugs #140141, #143555 and #155163.
• Some ffmpeg/mplayer dudes are working on a WMV9 decoder (currently a simple bitstream parser). They're about as far as I got, and they're having the same issues I had. Nice to see I'm not just stupid. ;).
• Divx Labs figured it'd be cool to write a new media format. Unfortunately for them and fortunately for me, it's just AVI with some non-standard chunks for subtitles.
• At newyear, a friend and me promised we'd do sports each week. It's been freezing outside ever since, but we still try to keep to our sayings. No wonder most people give up within a month... I'll need to get us tennis cards for the indoor courts before next week. :).

Metadata and deprecation
Today's CVS of Cupid has tag support. Currently works for Ogg and AVI, but I'll add it to other formats as I see fit later on, if the format supports it, that is. Should release 0.0.2 sometime soon, since it's had quite some updates and fixes since I released 0.0.1 just after newyear.

I also decided to have a look at the new APIs of the day and try to update Cupid to it. Noticed that GtkFileChooserButton cannot do save actions (filed as #164900), which means I need to continue using GnomeFileEntry. GtkUIManager (replacing GnomeUIInfo) keeps confusing me for some reason, maybe I need to look for some hello world example code (which http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/GtkUIManager.html basically is, but not just yet). GtkTextView looks nice, but is incredibly complex if you just want a simple HTML-like textbox. How do I get the complete text from the GtkTextBuffer...? Need to move over to GOption (instead of popt) at some point too, but GStreamer doesn't use it yet, which is kind of annoying. I guess I'll quietly continue to use deprecated widgets/objects for a while longer until I get familiar with the new ones...

EU horrors
Remember how last month, EU patents were not accepted after Poland did a great job? FFII reported on it, as did others. Apparently, our agriculture politicians are very hard-headed people, because they've decided to try again. Yes, boys'n'girls, the agriculture EU people know what's best for you.

Eh...

You're European? Write a letter to your national agriculture minister, today. Don't ask me what agriculture and computing sciences have to do with each other. I don't know. But I'm sure they can tell us, because boy, those agriculture politicians make some heavy decisions for us...

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.