Older blog entries for zeenix (starting at number 292)

FOSDEM

I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting

Not only that, I am also delivering a talk on one of my favorite programming languages, Vala. My other favorite language is always nicely presented by his awesomeness, Andy Wingo so I don't need to talk about that. :)

Yes, I'm not doing a rygel or gupnp talk this time. My apologies if that disappoints anyone. :)

Syndicated 2011-02-01 22:50:00 (Updated 2011-02-01 22:50:09) from zeenix

24 Jan 2011 (updated 24 Jan 2011 at 02:11 UTC) »

Rygel needs your help!

While it is a well known fact that Rygel is as awesome as this new Intrepid class ship of mine in Star Trek Online



unfortunately its preferences UI looks as ugly as this



Apart from being ugly, it also doesn't really integrate well in GNOME as there is already a UI that lets you easily specify your file sharing preferences: gnome-user-share. I had some discussions with Bastien on how to fix this and we had agreed on a plan to kill this UI while merging the relevant parts of it into gnome-user-share in July 2010:

  • Rygel:
    • always starts as part of the session.
    • times-out and exits if there is nothing to share.
    • (MediaExport backend) doesn't share anything by default.
  • gnome-user-share
    • uses the MediaExport's DBus API to add/remove folders.

While the Rygel parts are mostly in place, Bastien (being a very busy developer) didn't manage to get any time to do the gnome-user-share part and neither did I. :(

GNOME 3.0 is happening very soon and Rygel might not get its due fame in release notes (again) if there is no nice UI to impress the end users with. So if you want to help either Rygel or GNOME 3.0 project, here is you chance!

Syndicated 2011-01-23 23:28:00 (Updated 2011-01-24 01:19:49) from zeenix

Rygel 0.7.6 (A Kiss is But a Kiss)

Rygel 0.7.6 (A Kiss is But a Kiss) is out!

Another micro release to fix the critical regression in 'Year' hierarchy of
Tracker plugin.

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

Download source tarball from here

Syndicated 2010-08-18 22:42:00 (Updated 2010-08-18 22:42:09) from zeenix

Rygel 0.7.4 (Look at the Princess)

Rygel 0.7.4 (Look at the Princess) released!

A new release in the current unstable 0.7.x series for upcoming GNOME 2.32.0
release.

- Fix wildcard handling in search request.
- Distribute correct copy of scallable icons.
- Provide icons in DLNA standard sizes.
- Provide icons in JPEG format as well.
- Don't offer transcoding from video to audio and viceversa. This makes sense
anyway and reduces network traffic.
- Only offer time seeking if duration is known.
- Report correct DLNA profile for MPEG-TS HD and WMV transcoder.
- List DLNA formats first in the list of supported formats.
- Provide correct values for out parameters of GetCurrentConnectionInfo action.
- Correctly handle HTTP 'POST' requests.
- Correct checks for vala bindings.
- Use new 64-bit size property in GUPnP resource API so that we can deal with
resources bigger than 2GB.
- Fix some (potential) crashes.
- Correctly handle a translated string involving plurals.
- Don't use deprecated libsoup API.
- Correct flaws in code related to search for media object by ID. This combined
with some changes in Tracker plugin (see below) improves the reliability and
especially the performance of Tracker plugin a lot.
- Use the mime-type and DLNA profile when provided in item creation requests.
- Advertize byte-seek support for thumbnails.
- Correct algorithm to decide whether to seek or not.
- Set standard header on XML files.
- Prefix service URLs with a "/". This seems like the right way to do it and it
might actually improve our IOP.
- Make use of new APIs to report all known DLNA profiles in list of supported
formats (MediaServer only).
- Add support for the "Genre" tag in music items.
- External:
- Handle AlbumArt property.
- Fix a few crashes.
- Remove workaround for bug#602003.
Tracker:
- Make sure metadata container get unique IDs.
- Performance improvements to search for media object by ID.
- Make use of DLNA profile when provided.
- Don't use Tracker's logo as icon.
- Ignore duration of '0'.
- Print debug after item creation in store.
MediaExport:
- Disable plugin when Tracker plugin is/becomes available.
- Require sqlite3 VAPI only for this plugin.
- Code clean-up and general speed improvements
- Extract embedded album art
- Remove the ability for user-defined virtual folders, providing a set of
built-in folders similar to that of tracker's.
- Fix some minor regressions introduced by the switch to gupnp-dlna metadata
extraction
- Move configured files and folders into their own "Files & Folders" container
to de-clutter root.
- Localization:
- Add ta translation.
- Update Galician translations.
- Update Hebrew translation.
- Update Spanish translation.
- Update Romanian translation.
- Update Slovenian translation.
- DLNA test cases fixed in this release:
- 7.2.14.2
- 7.2.28.1
- 7.3.25.1
- 7.3.26.3
- 7.3.26.4
- 7.3.29.3
- 7.3.29.4
- 7.3.33.4
- 7.3.33.5

Dependency-related changes:
- Require and adapt to Vala 0.9.5.
- Require gupnp-av >= 0.5.9.
- Require gupnp-dlna >= 0.3.0.
- MediaExport
- Require gstreamer-tag >= 0.10.28.
- Require gstreamer-app >= 0.10.28.

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
Jens Georg
Yaron Shahrabani
Lucian Adrian Grijincu
Kjartan Maraas
Jorge González
Fran Diéguez
drtv
Claude Paroz
Andrej Žnidaršič

Download source tarball from here

Syndicated 2010-08-17 14:08:00 (Updated 2010-08-17 14:08:16) from zeenix

GUPnP DLNA 0.3.0 & GUPnP Vala 0.6.11

GUPnP DLNA 0.3.0 released!


Changes since 0.2.1:

- New API and tool (gupnp-dlna-ls-profiles) to list all supported profiles
- Move API to get a profile to the DLNADiscoverer namespace
- Make GUPnPDLNAProfile opaque, add to API documentation
- Add support for several AVC_MP4_MP profiles
- Print stream topology instead of a simple list in gupnp-dlna-info
- Add debug output controlled by an environment variable for eaesier
debugging
- Beginnings of an automated testing infrastructure
- Add relaxed/extended mode properties (more details in the next release)
- Use 'bitrate' instead of 'maximum-bitrate' while matching streams
- Various bug fixes

All contributors to this release:

Arun Raghavan
Parthasarathi Susarla
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

GUPnP Vala 0.6.11 released!


Changes since 0.6.10:

- Require and adapt to gupnp-av 0.3.0.

All contributors:

Arun Raghavan
Parthasarathi Susarla
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

Download source tarballs from here

Syndicated 2010-08-17 14:02:00 (Updated 2010-08-17 14:02:29) from zeenix

Rygel 0.7.3 (Out of Their Minds)

Rygel 0.7.3 (Out of Their Minds) is out!

A new release in the current unstable 0.7.x series for upcoming GNOME 2.31.6
release.

- Add Album-art support.
- Add support for sorted Browse/Search.
- Don't push data after HTTP response is cancelled.
- Advertise support for search by "createClass".
- Revive accidently removed XBox hacks.
- Fix icon export for uninstalled case.
- Simplify plugin APIs to further abstract plugin developers from UPnP details.
- Add convenient MediaRenderer APIs for plugins. This involved moving most of
the GstRenderer code to core.
- Fix seeking once again.
- Improve error handling in HTTP request handling code.
- Port to new DIDL-Lite contributor APIs.
- Port to Vala 0.9.3 and 0.9.4.
- Clean-up README and specify build and run-time dependencies.
- More debug output.
- MediaExport:
- Make use of gupnp-dlna for faster, more complete and reliable metadata
extraction.
- Print a debug message if extraction fails for a file.
- Add windows formats to positive list of file extensions to include in the
metadata extraction.
- Don't share anyt folder by default.
- Fix url-escaped folder names on PS3.
- Fix issue of empty title of top-level virtual folders on PS3.
- Process 256 children at a time. This improves performance of harvesting of
large folders.
- GstRenderer:
- Rename to Playbin.
- Advertize support for 'video/mp4'
- Advertize support for RTSP
- Handle error from playbin.
- Don't claim support for unsupported UPnP actions and state variables.
- External:
- Fix a crasher bug.
- Localization:
- Add French translation.
- Update Simplified Chinese translations.
- Update German translation.
- Update Galician translation.
- Update Swedish translation.
- Update Slovenian translation.
- Lots of other non-functional and/or minor improvements and fixes.

Dependency-related changes:

- Require Vala >= 0.9.3
- Require gupnp >= 0.13.4
- Require gupnp-av >= 0.5.8
- Require gupnp-dlna >= 0.2.1 (new dependency)
- Require libgee >= 0.5.2
- Use gtk+-2.0 (>= 2.21.5) if available rather than gtk+-3.0

Bugs fixed in this release:

607411 - Need to mention non-compile time deps.
624445 - Samsung can't FF/REW/PAUSE when playing video/avi from Rygel.
625556 - New configure flag to switch GTK+ version.

All contributors to this release:

Aron Xu
Arun Raghavan
Claude Paroz
Eleanor Chen
Frédéric Péters
Javier Jardón
Jens Georg
Mario Blättermann
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

Download source tarball here

Syndicated 2010-08-03 23:08:00 (Updated 2010-08-03 23:08:37) from zeenix

3 Aug 2010 (updated 4 Aug 2010 at 00:06 UTC) »

GUPnP A/V 0.5.8 released!

Changes since 0.5.7:

- Fix crashes in DIDLLiteContributor API.
- Remove incomplete and broken DLNA guessing code. Applications should use
gupnp-dlna now for all their DLNA needs.
- Do set the 'dlna:profileID' property of 'albumArtURI' node and treat it as
mandatory as per DLNA guidelines (7.3.61.3).
- Prefer non-transcoded resources over transcoded ones when choosing compatible
resources for a particular MediaRenderer.
- Minor correction to DIDL filtering code.
- Some other minor improvements/fixes.

Bug fixed in this release:

2187 - GUPnPDIDLLiteContributor class doesn't work

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

Download source tarball from here

Syndicated 2010-08-03 23:02:00 (Updated 2010-08-03 23:09:29) from zeenix

Rygel 0.7.2 (Dream A Little Dream)

Rygel 0.7.2 (Dream A Little Dream) is out!

A new release in the current unstable 0.7.x series for upcoming GNOME 2.31.5
release.

* MediaExport:
* Support DLNA's 'AnyContainer' upload extenstion.
* Only harvest media files. We use a positive list for file extensions to
include in the metadata extraction.
* Implement fallback to the default (slow) search implementation.
* Lower severity for some of the console messages.
* Update code according to latest GStreamer Vala API fixes.
* Tracker:
* Improve Sparql query builder to achieve much better performance and reduced
D-Bus traffic.
* GstRenderer:
* Relicense from GPL to LGPL.
* More descriptive default title.
- Localization:
- Add Simplified Chinese translation.
- Add Traditional Chinese translation (Hong Kong and Taiwan).
- Updated Spanish translation.
- Various non-functional improvements to core and plugins.

All contributors to this release:

Aron Xu
Chao-Hsiung Liao
Jens Georg
Jorge González
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

Download source tarball from here

Syndicated 2010-07-12 17:35:00 (Updated 2010-07-12 17:35:01) from zeenix

Rygel 0.7.1 (Home on the Remains)

Rygel 0.7.1 (Home on the Remains) is out!

A new release in the current unstable 0.7.x series for upcoming GNOME 2.31.4
release.

- Implement DLNA's 'AnyContainer' upload extenstion. This allows clients to
upload items without having to specify target container. Currently it only
works for the Tracker backend.
- Report types of items that could be created/uploaded in a container and allow
clients to search containers by this property.
- Port last bits of C code to Vala. Now Rygel is completely written in Vala.
- Make Rygel build/work against both current stable and unstable Vala releases.
- Offer SD transcoding in EU profile. Seems certain Sony Bravia TVs only
support EU profiles. With this change, they should at least be able to use the
SD transcoding.
- Two more unit tests.
- Provide default configuration for WMV transcoding.
- Correctly handle boolean commandline option for disabling WMV transcoder.
- External:
- Port the external plugin to use the new D-Bus MediaServer specification:
http://live.gnome.org/Rygel/MediaServer2Spec. The new specification is meant
to be very generic and scale well to large media hierarchies.
- Make use of search API when implemented by the external application.
- Various other performance improvements.
- Preferences UI:
- Improve resize behavior.
- Add missing bevel to URI tree view.
- Replace GtkVBox by GtkVButtonBox where appropriate.
- Localization:
- Added Punjabi Translation.
- Updated Norwegian bokmål translation.
- Updated Galician translations.
- Updated Spanish translation.
- Updated Hebrew translation.
- Various non-functional improvements.

Dependency-related changes:

- Require gtk+-3.0 >= 2.90.3.
- Require gupnp-av >= 0.5.7.
- Require gupnp-vala >= 0.6.7.

Bugs fixed in this release:

593628 - mp2ts transcoder not working with certain Bravia TV models.
596214 - URI table is missing bevel.

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
Eric Anderson
A S Alam
Fran Diéguez
Jorge González
Kjartan Maraas
Yaron Shahrabani

Download source tarball from here

Syndicated 2010-06-24 23:38:00 (Updated 2010-06-24 23:38:42) from zeenix

Bridging UPnP Networks

As part of this years Google Summer of Code, Sunil Ghai (a student from India) has taken-up the task of securely bridging multiple UPnP networks across the internet. You can follow the progress of the project through Sunil's blog.

Before you say it, yes! I did get the idea from my "competitors" but unlike them, we are going to do it the (UPnP) standard and efficient (as usual) way.

Syndicated 2010-06-17 23:39:00 (Updated 2010-06-17 23:39:15) from zeenix

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