Present Perfect

GStreamer

Released 0.5.0 yesterday. From now on we'll try to stick to the "odd minor = development" schedule. I took apart the build last weekend to make GStreamer fully parallel-installable, librarywise. Looks like I succeeded because I managed to install both core RPM's at the same time.

We're still having some scheduler issues that are thread-related, and Wim and David were working on those a little more over the last week. It was really frustrating to notice that, after a whole weekend of breaking stuff install-wise, I couldn't even play anything in nautilus-media. So I started going back to old code to try and figure out where it went wrong.

I had hoped to release on monday, the due date for Gnome tarballs, but we missed that. Luckily, David figured out that the change was due to one innocent-looking line in a source file I missed. I spent some time yesterday on working that out, then fixing some other issues due to fixes, until nautilus-media behaved sanely again.

Some more sanity-checking, build checking, and we finally got it out. And then a nautilus-media to follow.

When I wanted to release the tarballs, I noticed I didn't actually have access to GNOME's release machine. So I set them up a Nigerian scam offer they hopefully won't be able to refuse. So sad when you spend so much time preparing a release but you are unable to press the big red button yourself ;)

Funny how some people at Red Hat all of a sudden have taken an interest in GStreamer issues. We had some questions from them, mostly concerning 64bit stuff. They got some of the tools guys to look at our cothread code. Apparently they say we are crazy. I can't tell - I don't understand that stuff well enough, I can only guess and offer suggestions.

In any case, some of the fixes got in, but I'm not even sure stuff will run. So, Red Hat, how about a developer-accessible compiler farm ?. You know it makes sense. I do wonder what Red Hat are up to though. There has to be a reason.

Dave/Dina

And an amazing time was had by all... Last weekend, we installed the first user's Dave/Dina box ! Jeroen is our first happy customer. The look on his face when he inserted his Lord Of The Rings Special DVD collector's edition DVD's, chose to play DVD's, and then saw the menu and opening credits was priceless. He seemed genuinely happy and impressed.

It's going to be a scary time, having to deal with actual user feedback. But exciting nonetheless. One thing I noticed is that TV's tend to listen to remotes from the same brand. So our perfect remote is slightly less perfect now that going left in the menu also lowers the volume on the TV, and going down switches the channel. Ho hum. What's even more irritating is that it does this regardless of the fact that the remote has SEPARATE buttons for volume up/down and program up/down.

And I thought I had found the perfect remote, but alas ... Yesterday I noticed it didn't even have a PAUSE button. Pretty irritating when you want to get something to eat.

Meanwhile, Kristof has taken to writing stuff to download TV listings from eurotv.com. He tried using XMLTV at first, but came out with the same impression as me - it was none too well written and very hard to get going. He started writing his own scripts to handle tv listings. I haven't looked at his code, but he got it working in about a day and the end results looked very good. Somehow though we have to figure out a way to not implement everything ourselves.

TV

My acting career is going down the drain. I started as a soccer hooligan and my last appearance, last week, was as a gigolo ;) It was for a video clip reworking of Tina Turner's Private Dancer. Funnily enough, Uraeus chose that release name for GStreamer without knowing about this.

GTA: Vice City

What an amazing game. It has the right mix of reward and frustration, and lots of neat little touches all over the place. I love it. I've been trying to extract the audio from the disc so that I can play it in the car ;) So far no luck.

Sadly, it also has some bugs that cause it to lock up after extended periods of play. This mostly coincides with loss of solid graphics and loss of actual speech audio in cutscenes.

Break-ups

are hard. I miss and I wonder. I hope you're doing ok.

GStreamer Released 0.5.0 yesterday. From now on we'll try to stick to the "odd minor = development" schedule. I took apart the build last weekend to make GStreamer fully parallel-installable,...