Present Perfect

Spent way too long not writing anything, should catch up on that soon.

But meanwhile, a quick shot of our office stream on a phone

RTSP/RTP H263 streaming using GStreamer and Python.

Spent way too long not writing anything, should catch up on that soon. But meanwhile, a quick shot of our office stream on a phone RTSP/RTP H263 streaming using GStreamer...

Pfff. A whole day of fighting against a mesmerizing bug in either of python, gnonlin, gst-python, or pygtk. A simple program that did nothing more than

import gst
gst.element_factory_make("gnltimeline")

was throwing an assertion in python's garbage collector. I had this problem on FC2, FC3, and FC4. Edward didn't have this particular problem on his Gentoo machine, and Jan wasn't having it on his Breezy install (which has pygtk 2.7.something, by the way), even though his breezy was broken in other places.

Of course, I didn't have a need for this particularly short program, but for some reason gnltimeline triggers creation of some object that gets garbage-collected in my application where I do want to use it, even if I keep the element around. In Edward's examples, it only asserts when leaving the application; but when I use it, it asserts as soon as Python garbage-collects after creating.

We tried a lot of different approaches, and in the end I just gave up. Days like these are lost forever. It probably didn't help that I was still a bit tired after last night's Xiph meeting at 2 AM, but still - compared to last week's excellent flow in dire circumstances (more later) this day was an absolute low point.

Pfff. A whole day of fighting against a mesmerizing bug in either of python, gnonlin, gst-python, or pygtk. A simple program that did nothing more than import gst gst.element_factory_make("gnltimeline") was...

asleep in the sun with the ocean washing over

Kristien and I spent a weekend at Mallorca. Mallorca is very nice - if you manage to stay away from the touristy bits (one strip of road we passed had no less than seven (7) SPAR stores over a length of one kilometer). Luckily we had an excellent local guide in the form of our friend Jauma - or "Jim" as his Mallorquina friends call him.

We spent the weekend going to rocky and sandy beaches, going to a birthday barbecue in a house with a nice swimming pool and lots of food (eating in the pool is an excellent way to spend an evening), partying at the local fiesta, snorkeling and frolicking in the water, and visiting some small towns, including the town where we were trying to get invited to Michael Douglas' and Catherine Zeta-Jones' outhouse. Sadly the happy couple had moved out and their place out there is now a restaurant where you have to pay just to get in.

that feline feeling

I don't know how cats manage this in this heat.

asleep in the sunwith the ocean washing over Kristien and I spent a weekend at Mallorca. Mallorca is very nice - if you manage to stay away from the touristy...

A one-acter to be performed in a square-shaped room with unopenable windows

DRAMATIS PERSONAE:

Thorsten

a dashing young man with an autistic hang-up on quality in all the wrong places

hedonism

an IRC bot insulting people who break the build, and praising those who fix it

Dorkus Molorkus

a big-haired hacker sitting opposite of Thorsten

gstreamer

an interesting little CVS module giving home to libgstreamer.so and libgstbase.so

Hobbit

an intern with a craving for cheese caught in the crossfire

the GNU toolchain

a collection of useful tools evolved through combinations of genetic programming and bacterial cultivation techniques

gst-plugins

another CVS module depending on gstreamer and providing libgstaudio.so and containing a plugin called libgstximagesink.so

Hens Jamestridge

a wise hacker secreting years of experience into little pearls of information somewhere south of the equator

I'm sorry, but figuring out linking problems hurts my brain. I had to retaliate and hurt yours too.

A one-acter to be performed in a square-shaped room with unopenable windows DRAMATIS PERSONAE: Thorsten a dashing young man with an autistic hang-up on quality in all the wrong places...

this guy now works for us

Michael Smith (of icecast and vorbis-tools) joined us yesterday. He made his first commit to Flumotion today, woohoo.
All of us here at the office are currently working hard on GStreamer 0.9
Some excellent progress is being made, definitely liking some of the things I see. Andy is busy porting over elements that Flumotion uses, Edward is rocking hard on the python bindings, Wim is working out more core issues and finishing his GLib patches, and Christian is cheerleading and testing.

I started running Jamboree with 0.9. I imported my 120 GB of Ogg Vorbis files and saw it die around 10% of the way through due to lack of memory. So I wanted to valgrind the gst code it's using to read tags, but ever since upgrading to FC4 my valgrind kept segfaulting on me. Until I realized I had an old compiled-from-source copy in my homedir's prefix. After removing that, it worked again. And after doing that, I started to actually valgrind our unit tests. That was a good idea - it turned up a whole bunch of leaks and issues to work on. I stole the idea of valgrinding regression tests from Conrad Parker, and it's pretty damn smart. So I spent two days adding more and more of them to our valgrind test suite, fixing bugs along the way.

I wanted to turn it on by default as part of make check, but since versions before 2.4 didn't have decent threading support, some of our build slaves started locking up. So I guess I'll need to make a separate target for the valgrind tests.

this guy is a visionary he valgrinds his regression tests - from make check -

I'm liking the use of subclassing in the 0.9 branch of GStreamer. I had added a num-buffers property to sinesrc to make it easier to test pipeline cleanup, just like fakesrc had. Except I noticed this week it was leaking a buffer somewhere. So instead of debugging the code, I moved the num-buffers property to basesrc (since all sources send buffers, so all of them can EOS after sending a number of buffers if wanted), and removed it from fakesrc and sinesrc. So, end result:

• the leak in sinesrc is fixed
• I removed two blocks of code and added one, so there's less code now
• I also get the num-buffers property on videotestsrc (and other sources) for free.

my view on the world, 50% the horror, the hair, the alphabet

After fixing the more obvious leaks related to tagging, jamboree read my whole 120 GB of Oggs in one single go. Been playing ever since that, too. There's a bug for mp3, I guess we need to look at that. But I've got enough music for now...

The next GStreamer is going to be excellent. It's taking time, but the seeking is luverly, the threading seems to work out very well, and there's some serious quality being spread out over it.

Time for some Quakage - later.

this guy now works for us Michael Smith (of icecast and vorbis-tools) joined us yesterday. He made his first commit to Flumotion today, woohoo. All of us here at the...