GMyth dead?

Do you use MythTV? Do you use Totem?

GMyth, which Totem uses to access MythTV installations (watching recordings, and live TV) is dead upstream. Is anyone interested in taking over from upstream, and updating/maintaining Totem's plugin?

If I don't see any movement on this, I'll be forced to remove the MythTV plugin from Totem.

Code for cash: Summer of Code ideas

As you might know, the time as come to put in your applications for Google's Summer of Code project ideas.

There's a good bunch of ideas available on the GNOME side of things, but if you fancy helping out GNOME without working on GNOME, you might also like the ideas from FFMpeg, GStreamer, or BlueZ (some of it directly related to gnome-bluetooth).

And if you're into web development, we have 2 good ideas in the GNOME Wiki (See the Front-end for common web services and Collaboration server/client ideas).

iPhone and iPod touch support in Fedora

As Martin posted recently, libimobiledevice hit 1.0.0 earlier this week.

As a timeline of what's available in Fedora, here's a list of the features available in each Fedora release for iPhone and iPod Touch users:

- Fedora 11 contains libimobiledevice 1.0.0 and filesystem access through ifuse

- Fedora 12 was the first distribution to ship with out-of-the-box support for gvfs-afc, presenting you with your device on the desktop as soon as plugged in.

- Fedora 13 (and the upcoming Beta) will contain libgpod and Rhythmbox with music syncing support for those devices.

Loads of tweaks are happening now in Fedora 13 to make the experience smoother. Feedback in the bugzillas, as per usual.

Guessing DVD titles

I just pushed discident-glib to GNOME git, a small library that uses discident.com's service to guess the title of DVDs. They have a database of some 250k DVDs, though the database itself isn't open, and the API doesn't seem to allow submission.

Still a few FIXMEs to go through and API docs to write, and it should be ready to be integrated in your favourite DVD ripper.

Drop me a line if you're interested in using it in your app.

Speaker testing

Based off the work Lennart did, let me introduce you to the speaker testing UI in gnome-volume-control.

Patch lives in Bugzilla, and will be in the Fedora 13 repositories shortly.

I can't even spell my own name?!

Thanks to David, I finally fixed the header title of my blog to spell my name in Hebrew properly. David, don't hesitate to let me know if it still sucks :)

For the record, the banner was previously in Katakana, then in Arabic for a while (thanks Imed!), and in Hebrew since Eitan kindly transliterated my name for me.

If you have some Hindie skills, drop me a note :)

Before everything is broken

As my awesome hosting provider is closing his servers soon, I moved my DNS to using GANDI's DNS servers, and my mail to Google's servers. Things should still be working as before, but do let me know if I really broke something...

Tea break! (and High-Quality vids)

We're currently closing up on some discussions at the GNOME UX Hackfest, and I'm going through my browsing history and cleaning up my TODO lists at the same time.

I thought I'd mention this nice link if you haven't seen it. Theora, when encoded with a newer Theora (Thunelsda) encoder, should at least match “MPEG-4” (in quotes, because I don't want to mention specific profiles, and get into a pissing contest).

Monty's been working on Theora and Vorbis quite a bit, and I'm pretty sure he would admit that the Theora of past didn't do justice to the capabilities of the codec.

Have fun with the surround sound work in Vorbis too :)

We're (re)moving settings again

Currently at the GNOME UX hackfest in London, where plenty of good discussions are happening.

One thing we discussed recently is removing preferences. Everybody loves when we remove preferences because it gives them a reason to vent steam, and we love receiving abuse (“- Are you being sarcastic? - No, I never am.”).

There's been talks of "TweakUI" type functionalities in the past, with no one ever showing up, and putting their money where their mouth is, and implementing it.

Taking a well-known MacOS application as a way to represent super-tweaky (or crack-rock, depending on which way you look at it) settings and preferences, Jakub (with help from the ever tweaking Hylke) mocked up “GNOME Plumbing”.

PLUMB!!1!

The honorable Vincent Untz has volunteered with implementing the settings pane for the gnome-control-center to go along with the changes in other capplets.

The reasoning behind removing settings is never made to antagonise people. There are various reasons, taking into account the increased complexity of preferences and settings, the ratio of people using such features, and possibly the maintenance costs of having more tweakable bits. Contact your local designer if in doubt :)

A lot of us had hoped that gconf-editor could serve as a crutch, hoping the community (in that case, the community of the more vocal people that complain about the changes) would handle creating the settings tweaker that was alluded to so many times.

We're hoping this will be the end of complaints when features get “moved” for design decisions.

PS: We copied a Mac app, not because it's a Mac app, but because it had the simplest UI for displaying seemingly unrelated settings, and making potentially complicated settings easy to understand. Thanks guys for making hard things easier.

Shared-mime-info patches

Ooh, the strain.

If you filed a bug against shared-mime-info in the past and wonder why your requested mime-type still isn't in, it's just a lack of time, and the fact that most of the bug reports require too much work on my side to be integrated.

If your bug doesn't include a test case, I won't look at it.

If your bug is a copy/paste of a stand-alone mime definition file, I won't look at it.

If your bug doesn't contain any reference information, I won't look at it.

If your patch isn't git-formatted, I won't look at it.

If your patch breaks the test suite, I won't look at it.

Given the requirements to compiling shared-mime-info (git, a C compiler, and glib), I don't think I'm setting the barrier too high. Furthermore, all those requirements are spelled out in the HACKING file.

Let me know if you have any questions, or want clarification on some points, so I can update the HACKING file with that information.

User accounts dialogue

Over Christmas, Matthias worked on the first pass at the long awaited user accounts tool.

I did my bit and committed this afternoon the new icon selection popup, which allows you to capture and crop a picture from your webcam (through my earlier cheese work). I also committed the ability to save your fingerprints, as was available in gnome-about-me.

Screenshots below. More information on the Fedora Features page.

The new icon selection popup

Fingerprint enrollment

Webcam capture and cropping

Looking for Leftfield

I bought Leftfield's “Leftism” audio CD a couple of weeks ago, and managed to scratch it to death trying to put it in the tray of a vertical CD drive (and closing the tray with the CD falling out of it).

Does anyone have some rips of the CD for my legitimately purchased music?

Freezing Totem with text subtitles?

Then ask your distribution to backport the patches.

This has been fixed in Fedora about a month ago.

Sound Juicer "So give me a hug, it's your birthday" 2.26.2

Ross should be celebrating his birthday, so here comes a release of the old stable sound-juicer, with plenty of fixes you already saw in 2.28.1.

* Fix warning on startup when the configured drive doesn't exist (Bastien Nocera)

* Fix a number of leaks and crashes when the audio CD isn't known in MusicBrainz (BN)

* Disable paranoia when playing back the CD (BN)

* Fix CD-Text metadata using gvfs to work (BN)

* Don't truncate submission URLs (BN)

* Set MusicBrainz UUID in files, not a full URL (Philipp Wolfer)

Enjoy!

Sticky tape

Google might know how to write a web browser, but writing an OS certainly isn't their forte.

You might have seen Matthew's mention of the acpid hacks, some of the other sources are just as funny to read.

Hard-coded xorg.conf, because they don't want to run HAL.

Patches from Fedora 11

xscreensaver for a screen locker

Fedora 12, and beyond

Fedora 12

Fedora 12 got released yesterday, with plenty of nice new features.

My hand in that was the running bluetoothd on-demand, work on gnome-volume-control and its profile switching (meaning dead-easy 5.1 support), enhancements in the GNOME Bluetooth UI (which you probably already saw if you use Fedora 11), the PAN support in NetworkManager.

The stuff I really like is:
- the Bluetooth PAN support, so I can install the non-free wireless drivers on my laptop (which lacks Ethernet)
- the new notification theme
- the awesome work on KMS, and performance enhancements, which means I now use a GL compositing manager on all my machines
- the out-of-the-box mounting of my iPod Touch, though music syncing is still some way away.

You might want to read Matthias' interview for the Fedora 12 release.

Fedora 13

More recently work has started on Fedora 13.

nautilus-sendto got its own plugin API now, so you can extend it whilst keeping the code closer to your application or library. Empathy in GNOME 2.30 will take advantage of that. Pascal Terjan worked on the Pidgin plugin to make it use the Pidgin D-Bus interface, which means we don't need a Pidgin plugin to talk to nautilus-sendto anymore. Both changes are in Fedora 12 and Fedora 13.

Totem finally got some of my time, and a number of bug fixes have gone into the GNOME 2.28 and unstable branches. In master, we now have a nice OSD, disk-buffering of streams, reverse frame-stepping, and RTSP/HTTP authentication. Much thanks to the GStreamer guys, and Wim in particular, for making those last 3 items possible in Totem.

There's a few more items I'm still working on that'll sure please the crowds :)

A little OSD

Totem in master now has purdy OSD when you press a key, or a key on your remote control, and you're in fullscreen. Note that this requires compositing.

Screenshot streaming the Avatar HD trailer

Get Moblin, get GNOME

If you were to install the new Moblin 2.1 somewhere, you'd be getting a gnome-bluetooth powered Bluetooth panel.

All the code lives upstream in the gnome-bluetooth module on master.

No more stuttering

Today, as some of you guessed from my teaser yesterday, I finished implementing on-disk buffering in Totem, using playbin2's new features.

Using Totem in master with this gstreamer patch, Totem will start playing back videos as soon as enough buffering has been done on disk.

Note that this will only work for QuickTime and FLV streams, but that means that the YouTube Totem plugin and streaming trailers from Apple's website just got better, and should allow us to implement stream saving very soon.

Notice anything?

Answers on a postcard (or in the comments).