Crack, and uncrocked

I was amazed by FunPidgin. Whilst some of the features aren't actually crack, making things like these options is:

An option to use stock GTK+ close buttons on tabs.

An option?!

Anyway, Totem's playlist parser is now ported to GIO. I'll make a release soon, but I'd like to ask people to please test the hell out of it. If opening or saving a particular playlist produces warnings, errors, or crashes, please file a bug.

You can test easily by recompiling and using as normal: Rhythmbox (Podcast and playlist parsing, playlist saving), and Totem and its web browser plugin.

Unbreaking the broken easily: fuse and gvfs

xine-lib lives in the early noughts. Text subtitles need to be local files, and because of libdvdread, DVD images and directories need to be on the local filesystem as well.

Well, Totem now has support for both of those on remote locations, thanks to the fuse support in gvfs. All the code's in trunk, although you probably want to wait for me to unbreak totem-pl-parser's port to GIO first ;)

How lucky is that

Wednesday.

Monday.

Talk about a waste of time.

Much more TLA!

I'm on holidays ATM, but at a friend's place, and he's got a Freebox with TV-over-ADSL. That allowed me to test and fix the Cone (see where the name comes from?) plugin of Totem to have a good enough VLC-compatibility to handle the page. Details over in Bugzilla.

Late night French TV using Totem

PS: Vuntz owes me.

New TLA features!

Totem GStreamer in SVN got 2 new acronym-laden features.

First is DVD playback. Unfortunately, we still don't do menus, but now you'll be able to play the films on your DVD. The support is on-par with the old GStreamer 0.8 code. Thanks to Tim for the guidance in writing this code.


Second one is DVB support. Zaheer did all the heavy lifting getting the code into GStreamer. Now you should be able to watch TV on your computer using Totem, given a channels.conf file was created. More info in the DVB section the Totem website.

Screenshot courtesy of Zaheer

New Totem

Mathias blogged about one new feature in Totem, the playlist sharing. This allows peer-to-peer sharing of the current playlist using libepc.

I've done 2 releases of Totem today, 2.21.3, the old-school Totem, and 2.21.4, the new Totem depending on the split totem-pl-parser.

This means I can finally commit my big patch for Rhythmbox.

Next up, the big gnokii automake patch.

Podcasts in Rhythmbox

I mentioned this work a couple of times in the past. It's in Fedora Rawhide, although without the browser plugin. A screencast (as is now the tradition) speaks a thousand words.


For the people using other distros, you'll need the latest devel version of Totem, and the big patch in bugzilla.

Update: Blogger seems to have broken GIF files uploading. Don't open it in EOG. Download it, and open it in your browser. Next time, I'll upload in a format that Blogger actually accepts...

New Totem feature(s)

Totem got a few new features recently, courtesy of new contributors (which is a nice thing to see).

The first one to get committed was the tracker-powered video search sidebar, by Javier Goday. Unfortunately, I don't have any nice screenshots as tracker seems to want to index everything but my videos directory.

The other one is a long standing feature request, with the patch provided by Kamil Pawlowski, adding a menu item to select a text subtitle for video files. This means you can get subtitles for your legally downloaded video files, with the typos free of charge.


Update: Everybody loves screenshots. Here's one for the video search feature:

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!

Audio preview

After gentle poking by Matthias, I cooked up a patch that allows the sound preview to work again for Fedora 8. It will hit rawhide shortly.

Make sure Enable software mixing is enabled in the Sound preferences, and that sound previews are enabled in the file manager prefs. Obviously, you'd want pulseaudio running rather than esd, if you
don't want to tear your hair out when playing video.

Introspection

Tell me we're not going that way! That's why Totem is just a movie player. I hope we can manage to keep it simple and fast (although the Python plugin support does nothing for its startup speed I've been told).

ITMS and the podcast parsing

I'm currently putting the finishing touches to Podcast parsing in Totem, so it can be used for some plugins, such as my favourite Quicktime trailers sidebar feature, as well as giving Rhythmbox Atom parsing.

After finishing Atom and RSS parsing support, I set out to add support for itpc and itms links, as used by iTunes, and supported in PenguinTV. I re-discovered the inadequacies of old-style Unix libraries (when they don't work as advertised, at all).

If you live in NYC, or Seattle, and have a Starbucks at hand, you might be able to help with this potentially nice feature. Clicking on the song would add it to a personal wishlist (a feature which would also be useful for streaming radios as well).

Zonbu does run Totem

The guys at Zonbu finally fixed their multimedia page to mention they use Totem for DVD playback, after I e-mailed them a couple of months ago. And obviously, they don't use KDE but XFCE. Mr. Fourdan told me so himself... a couple of times.

More website videos and sports

This week-end, I added yet a bit more functionality to our NarrowSpace plugin (ie. the QuickTime compatibility plugin), implementing another bunch of missing Javascript functions.

If you have a website where some buttons don't work, take a look at the output of your web browser (using firefox -debug for Firefox, mozilla -debug for Mozilla, etc.), and you might see things like:

** Message: WARNING: Site uses unimplemented function 'totemINarrowSpacePlayer::GetRate'

Then file a bug against Totem's browser plugin component, with the debug output messages, and the URL to access the page in question. Hopefully, we'll be able to implement the missing functionality, as we've done for the Apple site above.

As for sports, I caught the France - Italy game on Saturday in a local French pub, after having watched England - Israel. And my cousin has made the Solheim Cup team this year (it's the Woman's equivalent to the Ryder Cup). Starts on Friday, I hope she does well.

Lazy^WWindows web, can you help?

Trying to fix a little Totem bug, could anyone with a Windows machine and Windows Media Player 11 copy the output of this page in the comments (of the blog, or in the bug)?

Thanks!

Note that I tried to install it with Wine, but no luck, at all.

New releases

bluez-gnome 0.10 was released, and now includes my patches for the "Browse device" functionality. I also released a new shared-mime-info and Totem devel version today. Everything's nicely sitting in rawhide now (or it will be if my last build worked).

Now, I'll go back to doing nothing, as I'm supposed to be on holidays.

By the way, the Simpsons movie was really nice, go and see it. That was my Wednesday morning AFK :)

Bemused support in Totem

Should have been a one-day quick hack, ended up taking 2 or 3 if I include the research into the (poor) alternatives.

Behold! Totem now includes a plugin allowing it to run as a Bemused server. This means you can connect your phone/PDA/Palm to Totem, and use it to control playback.

First you'll need Totem SVN trunk, and compile with the Bluetooth library headers installed. More importantly, you'll need a client:

• J2ME phones: JamSE (and not bemused.java, see below)
  
• Palm: BTAmp
• Series 60 and UIQ versions available on the Bemused home page

Install the application (left as an exercise to the reader), connect to Totem, and voila! Ready to control.

Now, a comment on the protocol and the code of the different implementations:

• The protocol disagrees with the native Linux implementation (INFOACK, or INF2ACK for INF2 requests? Null-terminated strings, where?)
  
• Doesn't handle Unicode properly, all over the place, the protocol uses NULL characters strings as end of strings, which breaks UTF-8
• More protocol problems, what happens with empty playlists is a mystery
• bemused.java has problems handling empty playlists, and truncates movie titles when not.
• JAMSE isn't open source, and seems hell-bent on using skins, and different clients for different mobile phones ("skin" size)
• The Totem code is horrible, doesn't handle directory listings (the protocol for directory listings is utter shite, and unworkable), leaks all over the place, and is a security risk (seriously).

That said, the competition isn't that great either, as it doesn't even run (although I just notice that my e-mail was actually answered, but didn't get to my inbox). I guess I'll be looking into Remuco soon.

Tidbits

Some toys I've had in Ephy tabs for a while:

• Intel's Think Thin laptop
  
• Sony's 10th anniversary T-series
• Plenty of nice Bluetooth gear, for, hmm, software testing

At least the Sony Ericsson and Samsung phones would be useful for gnome-phone-manager testing.

Totem has made it on System76's list of recommended apps for their laptops. The laptops look quite nice on their own right.

After running into some problems with FC6's Firefox, I'm filling in this blog with a copy of Opera with static Qt (quick download, fast install), and noticed their new Speed Dial feature. It's neat, and if someone managed to integrate the HTML version of it in Epiphany, they'll get plenty of free beers at GUADEC.

Who wants leg surgery?

Thanks Benoît for the link to SUN's JDS patches.

If anyone ships this Totem patch, they get to fix all their bugs themselves. As if X worked that well with threads, they're making all the display locking no-ops. If it hangs, your libraries are broken, and you're just 4 years late fixing it.

Update: Damien kindly posted a link to the original bug report. And it confirmed my above assumption. They have a broken libXi. For reference, the original Totem bug report.

MacOS X can suck loads too

That's what I got when testing QuickTime's helpers when a codec isn't supported (which happens fairly often). It doesn't ooze ease-of-use.