Older blog entries for walken (starting at number 23)

Busy switching jobs.

At the office I've spent last two days writing docs for the stuff I had written lately. Things are pretty polished now, so I think they will be able to use these after I leave.

Going to france for two weeks for vacation time. Well, I'll probably spend more time in switzerland with my GF anyway :) taking plane tomorrow in the evening, and coming back on the 19th.

Not found an appartment yet, so I will have to do this when I come back from vacation. This will be a huge mess, but oh well.

I have not done much on mpeg2dec last 10 days, and I dont expect to do much next 3 weeks either. I think things should get a bit better after that though. Crossing fingers.

Resigned today. I will start working at VmWare in 4 weeks. Yay !

sh: videolan currently has more features than oms or mpeg2dec, but wait till we get sync :-) I still hope that someday you might want to plug libmpeg2 inside vlc. Just need to keep coding until it makes a convincing case :)

Xmas holiday was nice - my GF came from switzerland for 3 weeks. Of course I only miss her more now. Long distance relationships are not nice everyday...

Spent more time on mpeg2dec, and actually made a 0.2.0 release earlier this evening. Now that we have all mpeg-2 "main profile" features working I guess I should work on synchro and on robustness against bogus input streams - they still make us segfault currently. I'm happy how the project goes. It's a time eater - I would guess 2-3 hours per day ? - but heh, my GF's not around anyway, so I dont have to feel bad about spending time coding :-)

saw david and omega joined. Nice to see more video people joining the ranks :) David did a great work for the livid release yesterday, and omega's gstreamer project looks quite promising.

Greedily upgraded my self-certification to master. Yes, I'm that proud of my new mpeg2dec release :)

Hmmm. After looking more for the g450 thing I found some more oddities. I now have X working :-) But, this card is dual head and half of the time it displays on the wrong (second) head. I still have to find the setting that makes X display on the right head all the time. Doh :-)

Got my new machine, an athlon 950 (with asus a7v motherboard). Works nicefully :) I got a few minor problems with it though, installing a debian (woody) system on it :

- The two ATA/100 channels were not recognized by any of the debian rescue discs. So linux would not see my hard drive at all... for now I just plugged it on one of the ATA/66 channels, I'll try to see if linux can support the ATA/100 thing when I have everything else working. The controller is a promise PDC20265.

- I cant get XFree4 to work yet :( I dont know if this is because I have a matrox G450, or if it is because of debian. The best results I got till now is to get a garbled screen (the synchro frequencies are apparently very wrong) and have the X server quit, while leaving the screen garbled. Ctrl-alt-del from the keyboard still works. Huh :-/

If anyone else has an a7v or a g450, I'd love to know how to make it work :)

On the mpeg2dec side, I implemented support for field pictures, so now I want to do some video output lib changes and then releases 0.2.0. The libvo changes are a major subject of dispute on the livid lists, which is just not fun for anyone involved :-/

Sam (sh), I just love your new hammer design.

Finally made a stable mpeg2dec 0.1.7 release. Party time :)

That made me learn about autotools stuff. I didnt think it'd be so long to just take the current, working stuff and release it. In practice its not so easy, you want to update all file headers to put the GPL license stuff, have all the right README and INFO files, make sure it compiles everywhere, test, blah blah blah... Well I think future releases will be much easier to put out now that I've done that once.

Now that this is done I'll have time to work on features again :) beginning with support for field pictures...

Not been that much active this month.

libmpeg2 has been progressing slowly. Right now we have an mpeg2 conformance test suite and we seem to be conformant on mpeg1 streams, and mpeg2 when they don't use DMV or field pictures. Which means we are doing OK on most DVD streams. I guess I should bump the version number and make a freshmeat release sometime. The work on libvo and/or synchro has not progressed much though, which is quite sad...

I bought an used car and spent much of the week driving all around the SF bay to see friends. Fun :)

Damn ! I havent posted here for one month.

Lots of stuff have happened in the libmpeg2 since last time. I checked in the work I did on the slice decoder, basically a big restructuration of the code. Then I corrected lots of small details to make them actually comply with the standard. Then I rewrote the parsing code and we gained about 20% in decoding speed. And then MPEG1 support went in. Yummy :-)

I declared myself a lead developper. Advogato is good for your ego :-D

The next big milestones for the LiViD project will be to switch to a new API between the codecs and the output layers, and then to work on the synchronisation mechanisms. These times it seems that more people are coming to the project and trying to help. That's good. I'm trying to send detailed proposals for the output layers work, but this kind of coordination work always takes more time that you would want. It seems to be worth it though.

On the libmpeg2 side of the project, the next steps will be to implement field pictures and then the missing MC modes. The output layer work has a higher priority though, so I guess in the next days I'll not be progressing very fast on libmpeg2 proper.