Videos and Books in GNOME 3.32

GNOME 3.32 will very soon be released, so I thought I'd go back on a few of the things that happened with some of our content applications.

Videos

First, many thanks to Marta Bogdanowicz, Baptiste Mille-Mathias, Ekaterina Gerasimova and Andre Klapper who toiled away at updating Videos' user documentation since 2012, when it was still called “Totem”, and then again in 2014 when “Videos” appeared.

The other major change is that Videos is available, fully featured, from Flathub. It should play your Windows Movie Maker films, your circular wafers of polycarbonate plastic and aluminium, and your Devolver indie films. No more hunting codecs or libraries!

In the process, we also fixed a large number of outstanding issues, such as accommodating for the app menu's planned disappearance, moving the audio/video properties tab to nautilus proper, making the thumbnailer available as an independent module, making the MPRIS plugin work better and loads, loads mo.

Books

As Documents was removed from the core release, we felt it was time for Books to become independent. And rather than creating a new package inside a distribution, the Flathub version was updated. We also fixed a bunch of bugs, so that's cool :)

Weather

I didn't work directly on Weather, but I made some changes to libgweather which means it should be easier to contribute to its location database.

Adding new cities doesn't require adding a weather station by hand, it would just pick the closest one, and weather stations also don't need to be attached to cities either. They were usually attached to villages, sometimes hamlets!

The automatic tests are also more stringent, and test for more things, which should hopefully mean less bugs.

And even more Flatpaks

On Flathub, you'll also find some applications I packaged up in the last 6 months. First is Teo Thomson emulator, GBE+, a Game Boy emulator focused on accessories emulation, and a way to run your old Flash games offline.

C.H.I.P. flashing on Fedora

You might have heard of the C.H.I.P., the 9$ computer. After contributing to their Kickstarter, and with no intent on hacking on more kernel code than is absolutely necessary, I requested the "final" devices, when chumps like me can read loads of docs and get accessories for it easily.

Turns out that our old friend the Realtek 8723BS chip is the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip in the nano computer. NextThingCo got in touch, and sent me a couple of early devices (as well as to the "Kernel hacker" backers), with their plan being to upstream all the drivers and downstream hacks into the upstream kernel.

Before being able to hack on the kernel driver though, we'll need to get some software on it, and find a way to access it. The docs website has instructions on how to flash the device using Ubuntu, but we don't use that here.

You'll need a C.H.I.P., a jumper cable, and the USB cable you usually use for charging your phone/tablet/e-book reader.

First, let's install a few necessary packages:

dnf install -y sunxi-tools uboot-tools python3-pyserial moserial

You might need other things, like git and gcc, but I kind of expect you to already have that installed if you're software hacking. You will probably also need to get sunxi-tools from Koji to get a new enough version that will support the C.H.I.P.

Get your jumper cable out, and make the connection as per the NextThingCo docs. I've copied the photo from the docs to keep this guide stand-alone.

Let's install the tools, modified to work with Fedora's newer, upstreamer, version of the sunxi-tools.

$ git clone https://github.com/hadess/CHIP-tools.git
$ cd CHIP-tools
$ make
$ sudo ./chip-update-firmware.sh -d

If you've followed the instructions, you haven't plugged in the USB cable yet. Plug in the USB cable now, to the micro USB power supply on one end, and to your computer on the other.

You should see the little "OK" after the "waiting for fel" message:

== upload the SPL to SRAM and execute it ==
waiting for fel........OK

At this point, you can unplug the jumper cable, something not mentioned in the original docs. If you don't do that, when the device reboots, it will reboot in flashing mode again, and we obviously don't want that.

At this point, you'll just need to wait a while. It will verify the installation when done, and turn off the device. Unplug, replug, and launch moserial as root. You should be able to access the C.H.I.P. through /dev/ttyACM0 with a baudrate of 115200. The root password is "chip".

Obligatory screenshot of our new computer:

Next step, testing out our cleaned up Realtek driver, Fedora on the C.H.I.P., and plenty more.

Good bye Totem browser plugin

10 years ago, I committed the first version of a browser plugin in Totem's source code tree. Today, it's going away.

The landscape of video on the Web changed, then changed back again, and web technologies have moved on. We've witnessed:

• The fall of RealPlayer
• The rise of Flash video players, as a way to turn videos into black boxes with minimal "copy protection" (cf. "YouTube downloader" in your favourite search engine)
• The rise and precipitous fall of Silverlight (with only a handful of websites, ever, or still, using it)
• And most importantly, the advent of HTML5's <video> tag

Totem's browser plugin did as good a job as it could mimicking legacy web browser plugins from other platforms, such as QuickTime or Windows Media Player (even we stopped caring about the RealPlayer mimicking).

It wasn't helped by the ill-defined Netscape Plugin APIs (NPAPI) which meant that we never knew whether we'd receive a stream for the video we were about to play, or maybe not at all, and when you request one, you'd get one automatic one and the one you requested, or whether it would download empty files. Or we couldn't tell to open in another application when clicking directly on a file. All in all, pretty dire.

We made attempts at replacing the Flash plugin for playing back videos, but the NPAPI meant that we needed to handle everything or nothing. Ideally, we'd have been able to tell the browser to use our browser plugin for websites that we could support through libquvi, and either fallback to a placeholder or the real Flash plugin for other cases. NPAPI didn't allow us to do that.

The current state of media playback in browsers on Linux is such that:

• WebKit-based players (such as GNOME's own Web), Firefox and Chrome all support HTML5 media playback (with slightly different codec support)
• The Flash plugin is only supported with Chrome's Pepper Plugin API, which Firefox will not support.
• Chrome will soon not support NPAPI plugins.

Given all this, and the facts that Totem's browser plugin will not work on Wayland (it uses XEmbed to slot into the browser UI), that its UI is pretty broken since the redesign of the main player (not unfixable, but time consuming), and that it does not work properly in GNOME's own web browser (due to bad interactions between Clutter and GL acceleration in WebKit), I think it's time to call it a day.

Good bye Totem browser plugin.

I'll miss the clever puns of your compatibility plugins (Real Player/Complex and QuickTime/NarrowSpace being the best ones). I won't miss interacting with ill-defined APIs and buggy implementations.

Body popping

Apart from making plenty of security errata in the past week (thanks FLAC...), I've finally started on porting Rhythmbox to the new features of the Totem playlist parser, including using it for Podcast parsing.

What it means is:

• Atom support
• ITPC and iTunes Music Store podcasts support (thanks to PenguinTV)

I'll also try to make sure that those are better integrated into Rhythmbox, eg. when one launches Rhythmbox with a RSS or Atom feed. More on that when the full feature's available.

I got Flash working on Fedora 8 (on my x86-64 desktop), thanks to the integration work that's gone on with nspluginwrapper. And I can now listen to my songs and scrobble even when I'm hacking on Rhythmbox. Throat hurts from so much singing.

On a different note, my ankle problems have subsided (still a minor twinge), and I scored hat tricks on my last few outings, and a goal Thierry Henry would have been proud of (left side of the box, bent shot in the bottom right corner). Yay!

Hmmm, networking multimedia

After working around (read: that's not a proper fix) some stupidness in MythTV's frontend, my DVB-T experience just got a lot better, as I can finally watch the stuff I record. That includes recording all the Match Of The Day shows (just in case), as well as the kinky Secret Diary Of A Callgirl.

After switching the Mac Mini to wired, the network is fast enough for the MythTV sources in GStreamer to stream to Totem, as well as streaming via UPNP to the PS3. The UPNP framework in MythTV doesn't export a lot of the things it could, such as a thumbnail, the length of the movie, etc.

Just like chpe, I've been getting increasingly frustrated at the Web going to Flash Video for streaming, instead of sticking to the embedded movie player. I guess that targetting one platform (Flash) as opposed to the big three (WMP, Real and Quicktime), is a boon for Web developers. And that's how EA pushes the online replays from FIFA.

And to the PS3 again, with Frank's help, I've fixed up Rhythmbox' UPNP source.

So, on the TODO list:

• Better UPNP in Rhythmbox
• Finishing MythTV support in Totem
• More work on the browser plugin

Feel free to help, or send me stuff from my wishlist. It's just like writing code.