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...

Easter trackback

I had a very calm and relaxing Easter week-end, some strolling in the castle park under the sun, drank plenty of Pimm's, and some bank holiday gardening. I managed to catch up somewhat on my films, and I watched:

• Domino (rubbish)
• The Prestige (full of twists and turns, A-class)
• MI: 3 (worse than the 2 prior iterations, by miles)
• Porco Rosso (not as good as I expected, but entertaining)
• Howl's Moving Castle (a magical must-see)
• Night At The Museum (guilty pleasure, and not as bad as the trailer made it anticipate)
• and the Pursuit Of Happyness (excrucianting rags to riches film, horrible to watch even if you know it's all going to end well).

I've also managed to add some covers to my MP3 rips of Mixmag cover CDs. Took a while, but the great discogs had pretty much all of them with decent quality.

What a night!

I got my evening out to go to the pub to watch my team play their quarter-finals return game against Roma, all expectant, a bit reassured that the result might go our way with the good passing in the first 10 minutes. I needn't be too worried as United showed Roma how to play. What a night!

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.