Older blog entries for zeenix (starting at number 298)

Rygel 0.10 is here!

We just made our first stable releases of Rygel after many months of active development. I used to post a blog entry after each release with the full-log but I stopped doing that because some people didn't like it going to planet GNOME and I thought chances are high that other viewer might also be getting annoyed by it.

Anways, I would like to highlight some of the changes since 0.8.3:

• Lots of improvements to our interoperability with other DLNA devices in the market.
• Many optimizations to search, browse and streaming.
• More efficient and correct use of Tracker APIs.
• Richer media hierarchies.
• Simplified transcoding by use of new 'encodebin' GStreamer element.
• Preferences UI has been trimmed down to only provide a few options that users actually need. The plan is for this UI to disappear completely in GNOME 3.2 in favor of better (more integrated with rest of the desktop) alternatives.
• More configurability (through config files, commandline and environment) for power users.
• Ability to use Rygel as only a streaming server (without advertising it on the network).
• Ability to bind Rygel to specific networks by their ESSID or network IP address.
• Loads of random bug fixes.
• Port to more modern APIs. For example port from dbus-glib and GValue usage to GDBus and GVariant.

Syndicated 2011-04-17 01:19:00 (Updated 2011-04-17 01:19:03) from zeenix

Future Perfect

Ever since I blogged about me looking for opportunities outside Nokia, I was contacted by quite some companies. Some of them ended-up giving me nice offers but in the end the offer that stood out amongst all was from Red Hat. So last evening, I accepted their offer to join the awesome Spice team.

The reasons I chose Red Hat over others were:

1. Red Hat being undoubtedly the leader in Open Source technologies for more than a decade has always been on my 'awesome places to work at some day' list.
2. The Spice project that I'm being hired to work on is simply awesome.
3. They offer good working conditions.

I'll be staying in Finland and most likely working from home (unless I'm asked to work at the Espoo office). I will be officially joining Red Hat on May 2 and my last day at Nokia will be on April 21.

Before you ask, nothing disastrous is going to happen to GUPnP and Rygel. Of course I won't be spending as many hours on these projects as now but keeping in mind that my first 2 years of work on both these projects was purely in my spare time, I think I'll still be able to keep these projects running. Perhaps now I'll be able to better focus on upstream needs rather than that of my employers (more like working around DLNA conformance test tool issues).

Syndicated 2011-04-05 18:59:00 (Updated 2011-04-05 19:08:24) from zeenix

Yet another git history visualization

Here is a decade of GStreamer hacking squeezed into 5 minute visualization using gource.

I used the following commandline to create this:

gource -1280x720 -s 0.05 --stop-at-end --hide filenames  --highlight-all-users \
--file-filter po -a 5 --camera-mode track  --user-image-dir ~/hackergotchies \
--disable-progress --disable-bloom  --output-ppm-stream - --output-framerate 30 \
| gst-launch-0.10 fdsrc fd=0 !  'image/ppm,width=1280,height=720,framerate=(fraction)30/1' \
! ffdec_ppm !  ffmpegcolorspace ! x264enc speed-preset=10 ! avimux ! \
filesink  location=gst-dev-history.avi

Syndicated 2011-03-17 01:18:00 (Updated 2011-03-17 01:18:01) from zeenix

Rygel Development History Visualization (part II)

Here is yet another version thats twice slower (and therefore longer), has the gloom off and filenames disabled and is in H264+AVI format. Oh and this time I managed to use GStreamer to record the video, rather than ffmpeg.

In case anyone is interested, I used this commandline to create it:

gource  -1280x720 -s 0.1 --stop-at-end --hide filenames \
--highlight-all-users  --file-filter po -a 5 --camera-mode track \
--user-image-dir  ~/hackergotchies --disable-progress \
--disable-bloom --output-ppm-stream -  |gst-launch-0.10 fdsrc fd=0 \
! 'image/ppm,width=1280,height=720,framerate=(fraction)60/1' ! \
ffdec_ppm !  ffmpegcolorspace ! x264enc speed-preset=10 ! \
avimux ! filesink  location=rygel-dev-history.avi

Syndicated 2011-03-16 02:18:00 (Updated 2011-03-16 02:18:05) from zeenix

Rygel Development History Visualization

I recently discovered this awesome tool called, gource. Using that I created a visualization of rygel's development history and uploaded here.

Note that translation commits are missing. That doesn't mean I do not acknowledge or value those contributions but I had to exclude them because otherwise the screen was too crowded for viewer to actually see anything at all.

Syndicated 2011-03-13 16:18:00 (Updated 2011-03-13 16:18:33) from zeenix

Futures

Now that my company has decided to join forces with Microsoft, I am no longer certain of my future at Nokia. Although I would really like to stay until our MeeGo product is out at least since I hate leaving things unfinished but I don't see any harm in starting to look for other opportunities already.

So like my colleague and friend, Alberto I have put my updated CV here. Feel free to send job offers or suggest any good open job positions to my inbox.

Syndicated 2011-02-12 16:44:00 (Updated 2011-02-14 00:17:20) from zeenix

FOSDEM

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

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