Yay, less code

GTK+ now contains the old BaconVolume widget, called GtkVolumeButton. I hope we get GTK+ 2.12 for GNOME 2.20, so that Rhythmbox, Sound-juicer, Totem, Banshee, etc. can use the widget without cut'n'pasting bacon-volume.[ch].

Useless screenshot (you have to try it to believe it)

Many thanks to Ronald for writing the widget in the first place, and Matthias and Christian for the code reviews.

Licences and copyrights

A couple of problems have recently cropped up in the latest development of Totem, and we've tried our hardest to solve them.

One problem was that some files contained the exception to allow the linking of proprietary GStreamer plugins, but the addition of that exception wasn't agreed upon by the copyright holders.

This was the case of the plugins system (fixed), and the sidebar widget (fixed as well). The nautilus properties page was a draw. If we make it GPL with an exception, it wouldn't work anyway, as nautilus is GPL, and the properties page is linked directly in nautilus. The plan is to write a D-Bus helper, which would allow us to avoid hangs when checking the properties of some file.

Those relicencing was what kept me from making a release for 2.19.x, but it's sorted now. Many thanks to the copyright holders that allowed this to happen.

Ooh, free games

Totem bug reports had mentions of free games that look of good quality. There's Tremulous, and Battle of Wesnoth. Look neat, and both are in the Fedora repo.

Well stripey week-end (aka stripey #5)

Lapo Calamandrei went a bit mad, and produced a clever piece of artistic genius.

I'm sure he'll post the full icon theme somewhere soon for all of us to enjoy (he sent me a copy, but it didn't install properly).

Another little computer gets on the market (where you at Jeff? missed the Zonbu?), runs some form of Linux with KDE, but uses Totem for their movie player. Can I get a free one, guys?


On Friday, I managed to solve that really annoying problem that made the browser plugin with the xine-lib backend just not work at all.

Good and bad things this week-end:

• Cello, creepy, although not the best of the kind
• Man United finally won it! After the debacle of last Wednesday against Milan, we'll get a row of honour against Chelsea on Wednesday evening.
• Pan's Labyrinth, a special fairy tale. Beautiful. Narnia is for weenies.
• Ma Mère, a couple of tits, but horrible French art-house malarkey
• Arsène Lupin, pretty shite
• Michel Vaillant, pretty fun if you remember the comic from when you were a kid
• Les Poupées Russes, where you see that Romain Duris can be a good actor
• Shite results in the French elections (not that the alternative was much better, but it still was). Berlusconi, I'm sure Nicolas can show you how to be a better crook, his predecessor has quite some experience too.

More plugins, again

This time, the hero is Jan Arne Petersen, who added activation failure support to the plugin API, and then ported the GNOME 2.18 media player keys support, and LIRC remote control support to plugins. He also ported a lesser known functionality of Totem to the plugin system. The Gromit plugin allows "telestrator" mode. A picture speaks a thousand words.



It's not that well integrated into Totem itself, but the default configuration is still pretty good for Paul to have used it with his tablet to show american football moves.


On Tuesday, I received my new work laptop, a Dell Latitude D420. It's a shame I received it the day before they announced they were doing flash-drive versions. The latch sucks, the right of the underside gets pretty hot, and the screen is not as good as on my Sony laptop. But I didn't pay a penny for it, it's very light, and has cool shit like an ambient light sensor and a fingerprint reader, so it's all fine by me. I started filing a good bunch of bugs about making it work better, which will hopefully get fixed in due time.

Sqeaky bum time!

Fedora 7 is gearing up, and I'm spending most of my time fixing bugs. If you have a pet peeve (a bug, not a feature) for Rhythmbox, or Totem, be sure to let me know (by filing bugs in Bugzilla!).

I'm very happy that project for accepted for an SoC project. It means I won't have to do it myself, and that the person got the best mentor possible, the BlueZ man himself. And I'm never tired of hearing some success stories with the browser plugin. Changes a bit from all the bugs :/

I hope Aaron finishes his encoding profiles code in time for GNOME 2.20, as I don't won't to have to deal with gnome-media's profile code anymore.

Watched a couple of films: The Interpreter (I wanted to slap and drown Nicole Kidman for most of the film, certainly not her best film by a margin, and Sean Penn should stick to indie movies, which is what we like him for), and The Jacket, a tip-top if weird thriller. Bit like bath water near the end (soapy).

PS: In case you wonder where that title comes from. Plenty more goals where that came from.

I'm away

After a day of work at the factory^Wfixing bugs, I committed some more plugin work to Totem. Philip Withnall wrote a Galago plugin, as featured in the screenie below. It will set your Gossip (with Peekaboo support), or Pidgin (with the gaim-galago plugin) as away when watching a film fullscreen.



I added support for sidebar plugins, which means people can get cranking at an IMDB cover sidebar, a DAAP browser for videos, or even a tagger for Beagle or Tracker.

Thanks to David Schleef, I got libtool to like me (and my uninstalled shared library). noinst_LTLIBRARIES wouldn't compile a .so, so my plugin loader couldn't find it. The trick is install-pluginLTLIBRARIES:. Thanks David.

PS: fonts don't work one bit in Blogger, so no fancy monospaced font for the bits of code...

The playlist parser API has changed!

If you're a user of Totem's playlist parser API, you'll need to update to the new API. The change is pretty straight forward, instead of passing the title and the genre as arguments of the "entry" signal, we now pass a hashtable of extra information to the "entry-parsed" signal.

This means that you should be able to get extra information you couldn't before, such as the duration for a specific entry from ASX playlists, or comments from XSPF playlists.

I'd help, but my engine has problems

I've just finished an (almost) all-nighter to finishing stealing code from Rhythmbox. As soon as the licensing is sorted out, Totem will be getting plugins, so I can start cleaning up the code, and fix some long-standing bugs. This might also mean some cool new features like posters, or TV guides. Let's see what we can do.

First Totem plugin ever

OMGKYHO!

Ronald, that'd be because there's a bug in the code, and the free Fluendo MP3 plugin would be what shows up as the default in this dialogue. As Brian mentioned, the Codec Buddy page explains what this is about.

And the dialogue only shows what you need to download at first, I just changed the view so it looked a bit less empty.

PS: That's Oh my God, keep your hair on!

Totem news

At least some sort of news.

First off, I just committed support for xdg-user-dirs to Totem, so your Movies and Music directories will show up in the file choosers (which fixes a bug where Ross tried his hardest not to understand what I was talking about, and used "fab").

Secondly, Tim and Thomas have been hacking on codeina, the interesting part of Codec-Buddy. It allows users to purchase the codecs from Fluendo when they can't play a proprietary format. Hopefully, it will be useful for users that want to support Fluendo/don't know where to get Open Source alternatives/want great Windows Media support.

Paying for stuff can look good!

Finally, I committed some rough code to watch TV in Totem (xine-lib backend) using DVB cards. It's far from finished, but after creating a ~/.xine/channels.conf using w_scan (the easiest way I've found to create tuner data yet), "totem dvb:" will list all your channels in the playlist, and you're ready to lose some time.

Films: one great film, The Machinist (for those who liked Memento), 2 decent ones, Angel-A, and Cars, one I'm ashamed of, but not that much, The Devil Wears Prada, and an utter pile of crap that I stopped before the end (actually, near the beginning), Ultraviolet.

Totem was on Heroes too

Christian mentioned it to me some time ago, but I completely forgot to mention it in my blog. Totem was on Heroes, in the midst of all that KDE desktop.




You can see the very recognisable old-school window icon by Jimmac, as well as the distinctive menu entries. We don't have the nifty equaliser bits showing on the right implemented though.

(I actually thought it was an old version of GNOME with Sawfish/Sawmill the first time I saw this episode...)